Michael Silvestri - Policing Bengali Terrorism' in India and The World - Imperial Intelligence and Revolutionary Nationalism, 1905-1939P

BRITAIN AND THE WORLD
Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’

in India and the World
Imperial Intelligence and
Revolutionary Nationalism, 1905–1939
Michael Silvestri
Britain and the World
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Martin Farr
School of Historical Studies
Newcastle University
Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Michelle D. Brock
Department of History
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, VA, USA
Eric G. E. Zuelow
Department of History
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA
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Michael Silvestri
Policing ‘Bengali
Terrorism’ in India
and the World
Imperial Intelligence and Revolutionary
Nationalism, 1905–1939
Michael Silvestri
History Department
Clemson University
Clemson, SC, USA
Britain and the World

ISBN 978-3-030-18041-6 ISBN 978-3-030-18042-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3
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For my parents
Acknowledgments
This book has had a long and winding history, and in the process of
researching and writing it, I have piled up an extraordinary number of
debts. I first approached the topic of colonial policing in a PhD disserta-
tion at Columbia University, and although only traces of the original thesis
remain in the present study, the intellectual and financial support I received
at Columbia was critical to this book’s genesis. Sir David Cannadine was
an enthusiastic and supportive dissertation supervisor and I was fortunate
to benefit from the insights of a truly outstanding dissertation committee:
David Armitage, Sugata Bose, Leonard Gordon, and Ayesha Jalal. Ayesha’s
suggestion that I explore Sir John Anderson’s career in Bengal has led me
down many profitable avenues of historical research in subsequent years.
Needless to say, neither she nor any of the individuals mentioned in these
acknowledgments are responsible for any deficiencies of fact or interpreta-
tion in this book.
I owe an enormous debt as well to the archives and libraries in which I
have researched and written this book and in particular to the staff of the
Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections of the British Library. Over the years,
they have been unfailingly helpful with my research questions and research
requests and have made the Asian and African Studies reading room quite
simply the best place in the world to think about, research, and write
about South Asian and British imperial history. At Clemson University, the
staff of the Resource Sharing Office of the Cooper Library have tolerated
my innumerable requests for books, articles, and other materials and have
done an outstanding job of providing them.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of institutions have generously supported the research in the

United States, the United Kingdom, and India on which this book is
based. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Council for European
Studies, Columbia University; the American Institute for Indian Studies;
and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for supporting the initial
research for this project. More recent research was funded by the American
Philosophical Society, which awarded me a Franklin Research Grant; and
by the History Department; the College of Architecture, Arts and
Humanities; the Humanities Advancement Board; and the University
Research Grants Committee of Clemson University.
Some material in this book appeared previously in my article “The
Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita and Dan Breen: Terrorism in Bengal
and Its Relation to the European Experience,” which appeared in Terrorism
and Political Violence in 2009.
I am also grateful to many individuals for inviting me to present my
research at workshops, conferences, and seminars and for sharpening my
fuzzy thoughts on imperial intelligence and “Bengali terrorism.” I thank
Andy Syk, John Horne, and Robert Gerwarth for inviting me to partici-
pate in the joint University College Dublin-Trinity College Dublin con-
ference on Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War in 2010.
Thanks to Satoshi Mizutani for organizing an outstanding 2013 confer-
ence at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, on the transnational trajec-
tories of the Indian nationalist struggle. Bill Meier invited me to take
part in a very productive workshop on terrorism and violence at the
2014 Midwest Victorian Studies Association conference, while Kim
Wagner organized and led a stimulating and collegial workshop on colo-
nial violence at Queen Mary College, University of London, in 2015.
Audiences at the British Scholar Conference and the Pacific Coast
Conference on British Studies in 2017 provided valuable feedback and
encouragement.
The late Sabyaschi Mukherjee was generous in sharing materials which
he had collected on Calcutta Police Commissioner Charles Tegart. Jeremy
Ingpen provided insights on his grandfather, police intelligence officer
R. E. A. Ray, and shared excerpts from his grandmother Marion Ray’s
diaries. Along with other historians of late colonial Bengal, I am indebted
to Dr. Amiya K. Samanta, former Director of the West Bengal Police
Intelligence Branch. Dr. Samanta facilitated the research process while I
was a graduate student in Kolkata, and his publication of documentary
collections on “Bengali terrorism” has provided a valuable resource for
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
historians at a time when access to colonial-era materials on this subject

can still be difficult.
A number of other individuals have provided important critical per-
spectives, assistance, and encouragement. I thank in particular Brian
Drohan, Richard Hill, Harald Fischer-Tiné, Durba Ghosh, Eunan
O’Halpin, Heather Streets-Salter, and Kim Wagner. Conversations with
Kate O’Malley have helped me to understand the mentalities of both
imperial intelligence officers and anticolonial activists, while my colleague
Mou Banerjee has not only provided warm encouragement but also shared
her deep knowledge of colonial India. My visits with Ed, Claire, and
William Moisson have been the highlight of my research trips to London.
A draft chapter benefitted from a critical reading by Heather Streets-
Salter, while an early version of the introduction benefitted from the com-
ments of my friends and colleagues Steve Marks and James Burns. The
students in my graduate seminar on empire in the Fall 2018 semester
buoyed my spirits and helped me refine my arguments as I completed the
final manuscript. Gail Nagel was a careful and critical reader and an enthu-
siastic supporter of this project.
At Palgrave Macmillan, I thank Molly Beck, Maeve Sinnott, and the
series editors for their enthusiasm about this book and for their help with
the publication process. The careful and critical reading of the anonymous
reader at Palgrave provided comments and suggestions that have immea-
surably improved the final manuscript.
Ellie, Lizzie, and Bear care little, as far as I can tell, about British his-
tory, but I am grateful for their daily reminders that there is more to life
than writing books.
As with past projects, my biggest thanks are reserved for my wife and
fellow British historian Stephanie Barczewski. Stephanie has been hearing
about imperial intelligence and revolutionary nationalism in various forms
for as long as she has known me; nonetheless, she has never complained
when I have inflicted my work upon her and her careful and critical com-
ments have helped me shape this book from its earliest unwieldly and
inchoate incarnations. Even more importantly, I value beyond words what
Stephanie has contributed to our life together.
This book is dedicated to my parents, John and Carol, who have offered
unstinting love, support, and encouragement over the years.
Contents
1 Introduction: Imperial Intelligence and a Forgotten

Insurgency 1
Part I Policing Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal 23
2 The “Bomb Cult” and “Criminal Tribes”: Revolutionaries

and the Origins of Police Intelligence in Colonial Bengal 25
3 Surveillance, Analysis, and Violence: The Operations of the

Bengal Police Intelligence Branch 75
4 Intelligence Failures, Militarization, and Rehabilitation:

The Anti-Terrorist Campaign After the Chittagong
Armoury Raid127
Part II The Wider World 185
5 Transnational Revolutionaries and Imperial Surveillance:

Bengal Revolutionary Networks Outside India187
xi
xii CONTENTS
6 Spies, Sailors, and Revolutionaries: Bengal Revolutionaries,

Indian Political Intelligence, and International Arms
Smuggling233
7 Intelligence Expertise and Imperial Threats: Bengal

Intelligence Officers in North America, Europe, and Asia279
8 Epilogue: Bengal Intelligence Officers and the Second

World War327
Bibliography341
Index353
List of Tables
Table 3.1 Bengal Police Central Intelligence Branch Staff 80

Table 3.2 Bengal Police District Intelligence Branch Staff 82
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Imperial Intelligence

and a Forgotten Insurgency
In February 1939, the Governor of Bengal, Lord Brabourne, toured the

town of Midnapore in western Bengal. The highlight was a somber visit to
the graves of three British District Magistrates, which lay “side by side” in
a local cemetery. At the beginning of the decade, Bengali nationalist revo-
lutionaries had assassinated the three men. James Peddie was shot from
behind at close range while attending an exhibition at a local school on 7
April 1931. Just over one year later, Robert Douglas was shot dead while
presiding over a meeting of the District Board. His successor, B. E.
J. Burge, was murdered at a local football match on 2 September 1932.
For a British intelligence officer, writing in the year of Burge’s shooting,
the sequence of assassinations served as a “tragic” reminder “that the
Government are a long way yet from having been able to suppress the ter-
rorist movement in Bengal.”1
By the time of Brabourne’s visit, however, the revolutionary movement
had been crushed by colonial security forces and the use of mass detention
without trial against revolutionary suspects.2 The political situation in
Bengal had been transformed by the establishment of Indian ministries
under the 1935 Government of India Act, while the revolutionaries’ own
political tactics had shifted from individual acts of violence to communist-
inspired political organization of Indian peasants and workers.3
Nonetheless, colonial officials feared a return to revolutionary violence in
what had been one of the centers of “Bengali terrorism.” “The streets
were empty,” Brabourne reported to the Viceroy,
© The Author(s) 2019 1

M. Silvestri, Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World,
Britain and the World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_1
2 M. SILVESTRI
and closely watched by the police and plain clothes men and the shutters of
houses on the streets had been closed under police directions. The opinion
of the local officers was that it would probably have been possible to carry
out this informal visit without such precautions … but that, knowing the
past history of Midnapore and what they consider to be the untrustworthy
nature of the people, and knowing also the present attitude of mind of the
group which has been responsible for much of the trouble in Midnapore in
the past, no responsible officer would have been prepared to take the risk of
waiving strict precautions.4
In the following month, intelligence indicated that some of the revolu-

tionary groups were “definitely preparing to collect such old arms as they
have.” Brabourne added that the “‘naming’ of the present District
Magistrate of Midnapore, by one group, as a potential obstacle that might
have to be removed is a matter that cannot be lightly ignored.”5
Brabourne’s account of the elaborate security precautions in Midnapore
reflected colonial fears that had evolved over thirty years of revolutionary
activism in Bengal. An anticolonial revolutionary movement, which came
to be known to colonial authorities as “Bengali terrorism,” began prior to
the 1905 Partition of Bengal and did not come to an end until more than
three decades later.6 During that time, revolutionaries conspired to disrupt
the administration of the Raj, assassinate British and Indian colonial offi-
cials and their agents and informers, and commit robberies to obtain funds
for arms and ammunition in preparation for a mass uprising. In 1930,
revolutionaries carried out an attack on the Writers’ Building, the seat of
the Government of Bengal in Calcutta, and in the same year attempted to
re-stage the 1916 Easter Rising, substituting the eastern Bengal port city
of Chittagong for Dublin. After this act of intra-imperial emulation of
Irish revolutionary tactics, known as the Chittagong Armoury Raid, a
renewed offensive in eastern Bengal began to approximate a campaign of
guerilla warfare in which the revolutionaries commanded widespread sup-
port from the local population. Women also began to join the revolution-
ary societies and committed some of the most high-profile assassinations
and attempted assassinations in this period. In total, the Bengal Police
Intelligence Branch (IB) estimated that the revolutionaries committed
more than 500 “revolutionary crimes” between 1905 and 1935. In addi-
tion, the IB recorded another 200 cases of “revolutionary activity” from
1917 to 1935 alone, including cases of loss or recovery of arms, ammuni-
tion, and explosives.7 As Brabourne’s account demonstrates, a revival of
1 INTRODUCTION: IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A FORGOTTEN… 3
“Bengali terrorism” remained a near-constant fear of colonial officials

until 1947.
Lord Brabourne’s pilgrimage to the graves of British martyrs to Bengali
terrorism also demonstrates how the growth of Indian revolutionary orga-
nizations in the first decades of the twentieth century brought about a
parallel growth of imperial intelligence agencies. The Security Service
(MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), which came into
existence prior to the Great War and greatly expanded their operations
during the conflict, were staffed by a considerable number of officers with
colonial police and military experience.8 The small office of Indian Political
Intelligence (IPI), established in 1909, worked closely with MI5 (respon-
sible for security intelligence within the United Kingdom and the British
Empire) and SIS (responsible for intelligence beyond the empire’s bor-
ders) to coordinate intelligence efforts against Indian nationalists and
revolutionaries around the globe.9 In the decade around the Great War,
imperial authorities bolstered their networks of intelligence-gathering and
surveillance of Indian revolutionaries in North America, Europe, and
Asia.10 In the interwar era, intelligence agencies played a crucial role in
establishing and maintaining British control over their newly expanded
empire in the Middle East.11
Empire and intelligence thus developed in tandem and were closely
intertwined.12 Calder Walton in his study of post-Second World War
intelligence and empire observes that “from the earliest days of the British
intelligence community, which was established in the early twentieth cen-
tury, there was a close connection between intelligence-gathering and
empire. It is not an exaggeration to say that in its early years British intel-
ligence was British imperial intelligence.”13 In no part of the British
Empire was the growth of colonial intelligence more striking than in
Bengal. At a time when the personnel of both MI5 and MI6 dramatically
contracted from their peak during the Great War, the intelligence struc-
tures of the Bengal Police continued to expand.14 Prior to 1907, the
intelligence apparatus of the Bengal Police was practically non-existent.
By 1936, however, the Central Intelligence Branch of the Bengal Police
in Calcutta numbered close to 650 police officers, with more than 400
intelligence staff distributed throughout the province’s districts.15 Bengal
thus became both the focus of British fears of Indian terrorism and of the
most concerted police intelligence efforts that attempted to eradicate
revolutionary activity in the empire prior to the Second World War. While
recent historians have emphasized the important role of intelligence
4 M. SILVESTRI
uring the era of post-Second World War decolonization, the extensive

d
intelligence apparatus directed against the Bengali revolutionaries sug-
gests that the roots of imperial intelligence as a sustained practice lie in
the interwar era.16
While the revolutionaries’ anticolonial campaign was largely based in a
single Indian province, Bengal, and largely limited to a specific social and
religious group within Indian society, the Bengali Hindu elite or bhadralok,
who made up the ranks of these “gentlemanly terrorists,” its ramifications
were global.17 In the imperial imaginary, to use Kris Manjapra’s formula-
tion, South Asian “anticolonial movements were said to contain only lim-
ited and self-serving nationalisms,” limited, for example, to a particular
religion, social group, or ideology.18 Yet Bengali revolutionaries, like many
anticolonial activists, drew upon eclectic political and cultural inspirations
from within and outside India and made repeated efforts to form alliances
with other nationalist, anticolonial, and revolutionary groups.19 During
the Great War, Bengali revolutionaries formed part of global efforts by the
German imperial government and Indian radicals to deliver substantial
quantities of arms and ammunition to India.20 These anticolonial alliances
became further pronounced after the Russian Revolution. As Ali Raza,
Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah have asserted, the interwar era
comprised “a window of time in which an array of movements comprising
mostly nonstate or supra-state actors were linking up with each other.”21
Any analysis which seeks to understand the colonial response to the
Bengali revolutionary movement must thus adopt a similarly transnational
perspective.
This book examines the development of intelligence and policing
directed against the Bengal revolutionaries from the first decade of the
twentieth century through the beginning of the Second World War. It
explores the emergence of modern police intelligence in colonial India
and how in turn the policing of revolutionaries in Bengal was connected
to and influenced police and intelligence work within the wider British
Empire. The analytic framework of this study thus encompasses local
events in one province of British India and the global experiences of both
revolutionaries and intelligence agents. The focus is not only on the British
intelligence officers who orchestrated the campaign against the revolu-
tionaries but also on their interactions with the Indian officers and infor-
mants who played a vital role in colonial intelligence work, as well as the
perspectives of revolutionaries and their allies, ranging from elite anticolo-
nial activists to subaltern maritime workers.
The book is divided into two parts, which together seek to explain how
intelligence-gathering in Bengal became a central part of the colonial state
apparatus in the twentieth century. Part I explores how colonial anxieties
about “Bengali terrorism” led to the development of an extensive intelli-
gence apparatus within Bengal. The Intelligence Branch of the Bengal
Police and the Special Branch of the Calcutta Police carried out surveil-
lance of revolutionary suspects and ran networks of agents and informers
who were the primary source of information about the revolutionaries.
The immense archive generated by police intelligence was utilized to arrest
and (more frequently) to detain without trial suspected revolutionaries
and neutralize their efforts at political assassination and armed insurgency.
While anxieties about Indian terrorism remained prominent until the end
of colonial rule, and the revolutionaries over time exposed the weaknesses
of police intelligence, intelligence officers in Bengal established a growing
conviction that they could understand and predict the actions of
revolutionaries.
Part II explores how this intelligence expertise was applied globally—
particularly in the interwar period—both to the policing of Bengali revo-
lutionaries and to other anticolonial threats. While the twentieth century
was a century of decolonization for the British Empire, imperial intelli-
gence in Bengal increased during the same decades that officials in London
and New Delhi were planning some form of political devolution for India.
Bengal Police and Indian Civil Service officers formed part of a cadre of
men with imperial police and intelligence experience upon whom British
authorities could draw upon for intelligence work. They contributed to
the construction of a British “intelligence culture” which after the Second
World War was disseminated throughout the empire in a new and more
intensified fashion.22 Bengal intelligence officers thus contributed not only
to imperial intelligence institutions but also to an enduring sense of British
expertise in intelligence matters in the latter half of the twentieth century.23
In seeking to understand the origins and working of imperial intelli-
gence in Bengal and its impact elsewhere in the British Empire, this book
links two separate historiographies: the history of colonial knowledge, spe-
cifically what C. A. Bayly called the information order of British India, and
the transnational history of anticolonial radicalism and imperial intelli-
gence.24 Colonial intelligence in the campaign against the Bengali revolu-
tionaries stands in a period of transition between the nineteenth-century
empire and the development of what might be considered “modern”
intelligence agencies. Colonial police officers who became the authorities
6 M. SILVESTRI
on Indian revolutionary movements were not trained specifically in intel-

ligence work or in counter-terrorism, but rather as colonial police officers,
and the colonial context was something which cannot be separated from
their intelligence work. The early careers of imperial intelligence officers in
Calcutta, for example, encompassed mundane tasks of colonial policing as
the enforcement of plague measures and parking arrangements for vicere-
gal functions.25
The cultural world of these officers shaped their intelligence work, in
India as in other parts of the empire.26 These officers in turn created a new
colonial ethnography of the “Bengali terrorist,” which both added to and
drew upon the corpus of colonial ethnographies of similar collective
threats to British colonial rule in South Asia, such as the thugs, dacoits,
and criminal tribes. In time, they emerged as experts on imperial policing
and revolutionary terrorism.
In addition, the emergence of counter-terrorism practices in Bengal
helps us to understand the contribution of empire to the development of
British intelligence around the globe prior to the Second World War.
Intelligence work against the Bengal revolutionaries involved cooperation
(and occasionally conflict) among local, national, and imperial agencies. It
also demonstrates how intelligence practices were diffused throughout the
British Empire, as prominent police officers and civil servants involved in
the campaign against the revolutionaries in Bengal took up positions as
intelligence officers and advisors assisting colonial governments with issues
of intelligence work, anti-terrorism, and counter-insurgency. By the
Second World War, officers from Bengal had served as intelligence and
security officers in North America, Europe, Palestine, and Southeast Asia.
The primary intelligence agencies which monitored the activities of
Bengali revolutionaries were located in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London.
Within Bengal, colonial intelligence organizations were housed within the
police: the Special Branch of the Calcutta Police and the Intelligence
Branch (IB) of the Bengal Police. The latter was part of the Criminal
Investigation Department (CID) of the Bengal Police, established in 1904
on the recommendation of the Indian Police Commission. The Bengal
Police IB’s central office in Calcutta also collected information from the
province’s District Intelligence Branches (DIBs). Operating as part of
local police forces, the DIBs were established prior to the Great War in
areas that were centers of revolutionary activity, and by the interwar period
were located in every Bengal district. Until the 1930s, military intelligence
remained separate from police intelligence in India, but during that
decade, military officers with intelligence backgrounds were recruited to

the Bengal Police during the most intense period of the anti-
revolutionary campaign.
The Department of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) in New Delhi,
renamed the Intelligence Bureau in 1920, collected political intelligence
from Bengal and other Indian provinces, carried out investigations, and
forwarded reports and analyses to the India Office. With the development
of provincial autonomy after the 1937 elections that resulted from the
Government of India Act, the Intelligence Bureau placed its own officers,
known as Central Intelligence Officers, in Indian provinces. The
Intelligence Bureau also liaised with the small office in London known as
India Political Intelligence (IPI) which collected intelligence on Indian
anticolonial activists worldwide. IPI was a “‘catch-all’ co-ordination of
information about anything relating to India and to Indians within the
empire.”27 IPI was housed within the Public and Judicial Department of
the India Office and assembled its intelligence not simply from Indian
sources but also from agents and information gathered by MI5, SIS, and
the Special Branch of Scotland Yard. Intelligence from other colonial
intelligence agencies, such as the Political Intelligence Bureau of the
Singapore Police, and consular reports also found their way into the
IPI archive.
In spite of the multiplicity of imperial intelligence agencies, the persis-
tent anxieties of imperial officials about the Bengali revolutionary move-
ment would at first glance seem to be unwarranted by their achievements.
The Bengali revolutionaries never achieved their goal of a widespread
armed revolt against the British Raj, and many of their assassination
attempts went awry. Even so, the British response was forceful, in terms of
police action, judicial punishments, and elaborate security precautions for
colonial officials.28 By the 1930s, however, even “robust police action”
could not contain the revolutionaries, and the anti-terrorist campaign
underwent a considerable militarization.29 Bengali revolutionaries thus
contributed to what Antoinette Burton has recently termed the “choppy,
irregular terrain” of the British Empire. That imperial terrain “was shaped
as much by the repeated assertion of colonial subjects as by the footprint
of imperial agents; it is to argue that empire was made—as in, constituted
by—the very trouble its efforts and practices provoked.”30
This reminds us that anticolonial movements that failed could have as
much of an impact as those that succeeded.31 In the case of late colonial
India, historians have demonstrated that revolutionary movements were
8 M. SILVESTRI
far from marginal to the trajectory of Indian nationalism. Rather, these

movements now appear more broad-based, more cosmopolitan and trans-
national in their scope, and more influential than they had previously
appeared to be.32 According to Kama Maclean, “The presence of the revo-
lutionaries on the political landscape … strengthened the anticolonial
front, even as they tested and ultimately redefined the policy of
nonviolence.”33
From the perspective of imperial authorities, this meant, as Mark
Condos has recently argued, that the British state in colonial India was an
“insecurity state.”34 The scale of the colonial archive regarding “Bengali
terrorism” is testimony to the seriousness with which colonial authorities
approached the threat posed by revolutionaries. Extensive records regard-
ing police and intelligence work against the revolutionaries are located in
Kolkata, New Delhi, and London. The six-volume compilation of docu-
ments from the library and records of the former Intelligence Branch,
titled Terrorism in Bengal, totals nearly 7000 pages and contains only a
sampling of analyses and correspondence relating to police intelligence
during the final decades of colonial rule. Intelligence Branch records
from the colonial era continued to be deployed by the postcolonial Indian
state and have been considered confidential well into the twenty-first
century.35
The seriousness with which the intelligence effort against Indian revo-
lutionaries was regarded was illustrated by the India Office’s concern over
the publication of a novel titled Drums of Asia in 1933.36 The London
publisher Lovat Dickson approached the India Office to enquire whether
the book, which presented a fictionalized version of Indian revolutionary
plots and British intelligence efforts to foil them, might be considered
objectionable. The result was over six months of discussions within the
India Office and meetings and correspondence with the publisher. Indian
Political Intelligence strenuously objected to the book’s publication with-
out substantial revisions. The author had intended the book as an histori-
cal account of Indian revolutionaries during the Great War and a tribute
to British secret service officers. In consultation with MI5, IPI presented
a five-page list of changes to be made prior to publication, beginning with
an objection to the dedication, which presented the book as being based
in fact. The requested changes included the removal of any indication
that British secret service officers operated on foreign soil. MI5
observed that
In a nutshell, the situation is that writers may say or invent what they like
about imaginary agents, but must not state that Britain deliberately places or
instructs agents on any foreign soil or secretly anywhere. If their story
requires the presence of agents in such circumstances, it must appear that
their actions are voluntary and entirely free from British direction or
support.37
IPI was also concerned to remove references to real-life Indian national-

ists, and accordingly a reference to the Punjabi nationalist leader Lala
Lajpat Rai as a “brainless seditionist” was removed.38 In particular, IPI was
concerned about references to both British agents and to Indian national-
ist activity in California during the Great War, and action originally set in
San Francisco was moved to the fictional Mexican city of “Santo Morelos.”
Here the concern was the continuing strength and activity of the Ghadar
Party, the revolutionary anticolonial movement which had its origins
among expatriate South Asians on the West Coast of North America.39 IPI
observed that “The situation as regards California, where the Ghadar
Party is of course, still functioning, is, as it happens, particularly delicate at
the present moment.”40 Although the publisher complained that the
changes “seemed to amount to making a more or less historical novel into
a Ruritanian romance,” the requested changes were implemented, and the
novel was published in 1934 with a prefatory note which stated that “All
British Intelligence officers and agents attached to the British Intelligence
Service, in this book, are imaginary persons, and their actions and meth-
ods have no foundation in fact.”41
The colonial archive on “Bengali terrorism” also reveals the extensive
efforts to monitor, analyze, and predict the actions of revolutionaries.
Although the police of colonial India were “often ill-informed, ineffective
and at times frankly amateurish,” recent scholarship has highlighted how
they were embedded in colonial society and exercised extensive powers
not only of coercion but also of surveillance.42 While the intelligence appa-
ratus of the Bengal Police was never as comprehensive or effective as colo-
nial police officers envisioned, the campaign against Bengali revolutionaries
demonstrates how considerable state power could still be brought to bear
upon opponents of colonial rule. Albeit within a narrow sphere of colonial
society, colonial authorities in Bengal constructed an effective apparatus
for surveillance, which was, to those who were its objects, often
overbearing.
10 M. SILVESTRI
Bengali Hindus of nationalist sympathies certainly felt the intrusive

nature of such surveillance. In 1915, Gandhi’s friend C. F. Andrews, then
residing at the Bengali poet and educator Rabindranath Tagore’s school
Santiniketan at Bolpur in rural Bengal, complained of constant surveil-
lance and harassment by the Bengal Police. Andrews complained to the
Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, that his correspondence had been “tampered
with repeatedly,” while Tagore’s students and faculty had suffered
much worse:
At Bolpur our school is spied upon systematically, our teachers’ lives are
harassed, we have had guests coming to us who were CID men in disguise.
Sir Rabindranath Tagore is constantly troubled by the CID, his letters
opened, his movements watched as though he were a criminal. In Calcutta
things are so bad that students live in a state of fear bordering on panic. I can
only compare it to what I have read of the German Spy Mania at home.
Everyone knows that the CID had employed students as paid spies in the
hostels; and the most innocent students are in fear of some bogus case being
got up against them. They suspect all their fellow-students. They spend their
days now in a hot-house atmosphere of suspicion…. What is certain beyond
question is this, that the CID in Bengal, by the agents they have employed,
have created such terrible distrust and fear, even in the best men’s minds,
that nothing is regarded as too low or too mean for them to do; and so the
ball of distrust rolls on and on getting larger and larger.43
In reply, the Governor of Bengal, Lord Carmichael, admitted that “all

educated Indians, whom I have met in Bengal … apparently believe that
the police are spying on them continually,” and that they had “good
grounds for this belief. I have never yet met an educated Indian here who
trusts the police,” Carmichael added. “I doubt if I have met one who does
not hate and despise them.”44
The type of surveillance and information-gathering that C. F. Andrews
angrily denounced is at the core of this analysis. Part I of the book exam-
ines how colonial anxieties about the novel threat of “Bengali terrorism”
gave rise to new and extensive systems of colonial intelligence. Chapter 2
explores the origins of the revolutionary movement and police intelligence
in colonial Bengal. It analyzes how the rise of new modes of anticolonial
opposition in Bengal prior to the First World War sparked responses from
colonial authorities that drew upon older colonial fears of rebellion and
resistance. The revolutionaries became the subject of colonial “informa-
tion panics” which, as this chapter argues, had practical application to
colonial police and intelligence work against the revolutionaries. For many
colonial officials, the new revolutionary groups—seen as murderous, reli-
giously inspired, conspiratorial secret societies—represented a new variant
on earlier manifestations of Indian criminality—thugs, dacoits (gang rob-
bers), and “criminal tribes”—rather than an entirely new phenomenon. In
similar fashion, the institutions that developed to police the revolutionar-
ies—the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch and the Department of
Criminal Intelligence of the Government of India—bore a similar debt to
earlier institutions—the Special Branch and the Thagi & Dakaiti
Department—devoted to the suppression of what were regarded as dis-
tinctively Indian forms of collective criminality.
The Bengal Police Intelligence Branch was a pioneering police institu-
tion not only within India but also the British Empire. Chapter 3 examines
the structures and practices of police intelligence in colonial Bengal, and
addresses the questions: How did colonial intelligence work in practice?
How was this intelligence gathered, ordered, and understood? The chap-
ter explores both the routine practices of police intelligence and the in-
depth analyses produced by intelligence officers which sought to
understand the history of the revolutionary movement and to predict the
future actions of the revolutionaries. The establishment of District
Intelligence Branches throughout the province attempted to enhance sig-
nificantly the intelligence-gathering capacity of the police regarding the
revolutionary movement, and to remedy the persistent information-
gathering deficiencies of the colonial state.
As in other parts of the British Empire, human intelligence in the form
of agents and informers provided the primary source of information about
and lens through which intelligence officers viewed the revolutionary
movement. This chapter will thus highlight the crucial role in the colonial
state’s counter-terrorism campaign played by Indian intelligence officers,
who were the primary mode of contact between informants and British
officers. It will also explore an issue which was rarely discussed by colonial
officials, but was sometimes a factor in revolutionaries’ decisions to give
confessions to the police or become informants: the use of torture and
coercion. Lastly, this chapter will address the ways in which intelligence
officials sought to convert the masses of information they collected to
histories of the Bengali revolutionaries which sought to predict their
future actions. While the hopes of police officials for an all-encompassing
intelligence structure failed to materialize, intelligence work nevertheless
played an important role in one of the major weapons deployed by the
12 M. SILVESTRI
colonial state against revolutionaries: the widespread use of detention

without trial.
Chapter 4 concludes the book’s first section by examining the Bengal
revolutionaries’ escalation of their anticolonial campaign in the early 1930s
and the response of colonial authorities. While ambitious plans for a large-
scale rising never took place, the revolutionaries were successful in their
efforts to assassinate colonial servants and disrupt colonial administration.
The Chittagong Armoury Raid of April 1930 demonstrated the revolu-
tionaries’ capacity to carry out more ambitious attacks on colonial officials
and institutions. The revolutionaries’ intensified campaign of violence also
created a sense of panic on the part of the white community in Bengal,
who demanded summary justice and reprisals against the revolutionaries.
Although India was not a colony of white settlement, the responses of the
European community within India bore a resemblance to that of other
settler communities to the threat of anticolonial violence. Defense associa-
tions (the most prominent of which was known as “The Royalists”)
formed to protect the British community, and threatened violence against
Bengali Hindus.
The failure of the Bengal Police to prevent assassination attempts or to
quickly apprehend those responsible for the Armoury Raid led to the
deployment of new strategies to deal with “Bengali terrorism.” British and
Indian Army troops were stationed in key districts of the province, and
military officers (known as Military Intelligence Officers) bolstered the
ranks of the Intelligence Branch. The militarization of the counter-terrorist
campaign and the responses of the British community both anticipated
colonial counter-insurgency campaigns following the Second World War.
As the use of military force and punitive policing achieved successes against
the revolutionary movement by the mid-1930s, colonial authorities inten-
sified efforts to “reform” and “rehabilitate” many of the thousands of
terrorist suspects detained during these years in an effort to achieve the
elusive imperial goal of eliminating the threat of revolutionary violence
in Bengal.
Part II shifts the focus outside of Bengal to examine how intelligence
personnel from Bengal contributed to a British imperial “intelligence cul-
ture” which sought to neutralize anti-imperial threats. Chapter 5 explores
how imperial intelligence agencies responded to the global dimensions of
the Indian revolutionary movement during and after the Great War. From
the outset of the revolutionary movement in Bengal, revolutionaries trav-
eled abroad to forge alliances with other anticolonial figures and learn
about revolutionary ideologies and tactics such as practical instruction in

bomb-making. The Bengal Police’s intelligence and surveillance work also
ranged beyond the borders of the British Empire, as revolutionaries used
the nearby French colonial enclave of Chandernagore, north of Calcutta,
as a base for their activities.
Bengali revolutionaries formed a prominent part of what Tim Harper
has recently referred to as “the Asian underground” of nationalists, revo-
lutionaries, and political activists.45 This chapter will examine the lives and
revolutionary aspirations of some of the prominent Bengali revolutionar-
ies who lived abroad, and how imperial intelligence networks sought to
monitor their activities and thwart their revolutionary plans. While a num-
ber of Bengali revolutionaries lived transnational lives, often seeking ref-
uge beyond the boundaries of the British Empire, they maintained links
with revolutionaries in the province of Bengal. The prominent Bengali
radical anticolonialists discussed in this chapter include M. N. Roy, the
revolutionary who became the founder of the Communist Party of India;
Sailendranath Ghose, leader of an Indian revolutionary organization in
New York City; and Rash Behari Bose, revolutionary and Pan-Asianist
who lived in exile for almost three decades in Japan. Other figures with
more complex relationships to the revolutionary movement in Bengal also
came under the scrutiny of imperial intelligence agencies; these included
both the Latvian-born revolutionary known variously as Hugo Espinoza
and Abdur Raschid and the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra
Bose, considered by imperial intelligence officers to be one of the leaders
of “Bengali terrorism.”
Chapter 6 focuses on the issue of arms smuggling, a continual concern
to the Government of Bengal during the three decades during which the
revolutionary movement was active. While efforts to bring in large-scale
arms shipments repeatedly failed, revolutionaries were able to bring in
numerous shipments of small quantities of arms and accumulate an arsenal
of imported firearms. Revolutionaries relied primarily on networks of mar-
itime workers, which included not only European sailors but also Indian
seamen known as lascars. This chapter explores the motivations of lascars
and their relationships with Indian revolutionary movements, and the
efforts of imperial authorities in London, New Delhi, Calcutta, and else-
where in the British Empire to prevent the flow of arms to Bengali revolu-
tionaries. While this process at times revealed tensions between provincial
and imperial intelligence agencies, it also illustrates the diverse techniques,
ranging from the deployment of agents in European ports to special
14 M. SILVESTRI
legislation in Bengal, in the effort to prevent the clandestine movement of

weapons. These efforts made use of both colonial legislation designed to
control Indian criminality and international bodies such as the League of
Nations and the emerging concept of international terrorism.
The problem posed by the mobility and geographic range of the revo-
lutionaries and their allies created a demand for imperial intelligence
expertise on the “Bengali terrorist” overseas. While in the early years of
the revolutionary movement, prior to the First World War, authorities in
Bengal had sought the assistance of British police in attempting to counter
the revolutionary threat, by the First World War, officers with Bengal
intelligence experience had begun to serve the empire in locales outside of
India. Both Indian Police and Indian Civil Service officers with experience
of the revolutionary movement were not only deployed abroad in order to
counter Indian revolutionaries but also were also dispatched to other parts
of the empire to counter revolutionary and anticolonial activism.
Chapter 7 explores how police and civil servants involved with the
policing of revolutionary terrorism in Bengal attempted to apply their
expertise elsewhere in the British Empire and beyond against other nation-
alist and anticolonial threats. These intelligence officers served in Canada,
the United States, Ireland, London, Southeast Asia, Palestine, and the
British Caribbean. They epitomized a trend, visible in MI5, SIS, and other
imperial intelligence agencies in the first half of the twentieth century, for
men with imperial expertise to continue their careers with intelligence
agencies elsewhere. This worldwide deployment of imperial policing and
intelligence expertise was necessitated by the fact that anticolonial activists
were themselves highly mobile and utilized networks of Indian expatriates
and other expatriate nationalists, revolutionaries, and anticolonial activists
in order to challenge the British Empire. The lives of these imperial intel-
ligence officers reveal the complex spatial nature of empire and the ways in
which the revolutionary activity and imperial policing extended from a
single Indian province across the globe. Their careers also raise the ques-
tion of how information and ideas were transferred across the empire, and
how intelligence and counter-insurgency expertise were shared in the
decades prior to the Second World War.
* * *
Indian Civil Service officer Percival Griffiths, Burge’s successor as District

Magistrate of Midnapore, survived assassination attempts, and after a long
career in imperial administration and business, authored a history of the

Indian Police, To Guard My People (1971). Griffiths’ quasi-official history,
written with substantial input from former police and intelligence officers,
accorded the Indian revolutionary movement and the Government of
Bengal’s anti-terrorist campaign a prominent place. In a section titled
“Four Years of Murder and Crime,” he offered the judgment that by the
1930s, “the Bengal intelligence service was unsurpassed anywhere in the
world.”46 We do not have to endorse Griffiths’ hyberbolical claim or the
lavish praise he heaped on the police as defenders of the Raj to appreciate
that the police intelligence establishment in Bengal was substantial, and
that the campaign against Indian revolutionaries was both sustained and
connected to a larger global context of anticolonial activity.
By examining imperial policing and intelligence work against the
Bengali revolutionaries within and outside India, this study seeks to illu-
minate an important strand of imperial history in the years prior to the
Second World War. A study of police intelligence and revolutionary
nationalism in Bengal helps us to better understand not only the nature of
colonial power in late colonial India but also persistent and pronounced
imperial anxieties. It can help us to better grasp not only the nature of elite
revolutionary activity in India but also networks of anticolonial activists
outside the Raj. The extensive intelligence and police operations against
the Bengali revolutionaries illustrate how both imperial intelligence and
forms of anticolonial resistance designated as “terrorism” were an impor-
tant feature of the interwar period. As we will see, intelligence officers
from Bengal impacted intelligence and counter-insurgency work in the
British Empire and the wider world, and contributed to a growing sense
of British expertise in intelligence matters. Their intelligence experience
was rooted in the practices of colonial rule in India, and it is to that subject
that we will first turn.
Abbreviations Used in the Endnotes
APAC BL Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library,

London
CS Chief Secretary
CSAS Centre of South Asian Studies Archive, Cambridge
University
DIG Deputy Inspector General
DM District Magistrate
16 M. SILVESTRI
EB&A Eastern Bengal and Assam

GOB Government of Bengal
GOEB&A Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam
GOI Government of India
Home Home Department
IB Intelligence Branch, Bengal Police
IG Inspector General
IO India Office
NA UK National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew,
London
NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi
Pol Political
Pol (Conf.) Political Confidential file
Sec. Secretary
SP Superintendent of Police
Tegart memoir K. F. Tegart, “Charles Tegart of the Indian Police,”
MSS Eur. C 235, APAC BL
TIB A. K. Samanta, ed., Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of
Documents, 6 vols. (Calcutta: Government of West
Bengal, 1995)
WBSA West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata
Notes
1. Lord Brabourne to Lord Linlithgow, 22 February 1939, R/3/2/6, APAC
BL; and “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal 1905–
1933,” (1933) in TIB I: 822.
2. Colonial authorities, seeking to delegitimize the actions of nationalists who
deployed violence as a strategy, typically labeled them as “terrorists,”
although the use of the terms “anarchists” and “revolutionaries” to
describe members of the revolutionary samitis (societies) persisted into the
1930s. While some of the Bengali revolutionaries’ actions conformed to
classical definitions of terrorism (such as political assassination), others did
not (such as plans for broad-based uprisings). Accordingly, the present
study uses the terms “revolutionaries” and “revolutionary terrorists” to
refer to the advocates and practitioners of anticolonial violence in Bengal.
“Bengali terrorism” refers to colonial assumptions about the revolutionar-
ies, which form the subject of this book. For further discussion of the issues
involved in defining terrorism, see Charles Townshend, Terrorism: A Very
Short Introduction (2nd edition: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),

1–20.
3. David M. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of
Regional Nationalism in India, 1905–1942 (Calcutta: Firma K. L.
Mukhopadhyay, 1975).
4. Lord Brabourne to Lord Linlithgow, 22 February 1939, R/3/2/6, APAC
BL.
5. “Extract from Report from Governor of Bengal dated 6th March, 1939,”
L/P&J/12/395/62, APAC BL.
6. The key studies analyzing the history of “Bengali terrorism” are Durba
Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in
India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and
Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in
India 1900–1910 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). For aspects of
the history of the Bengali revolutionaries, see Hiren Chakrabarti, Political
Protest in Bengal: Boycott and Terrorism 1905–1918 (Calcutta: Papyrus,
1992); Manini Chatterjee, Do and Die: the Chittagong Uprising 1930–34
(New Delhi: Penguin, 1999); Partha Chatterjee: The Black Hole of Empire:
History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2012), 276–291; Durba Ghosh, “Revolutionary Women
and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s,” Gender & History
25: 2 (2013) 355–375; Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in
the Interwar Years,” in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring
Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Delhi: Orient
Longman, 2006), 270–292; Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist
Left; Alexander Lee, “Who Becomes a Terrorist? Poverty, Education and
the Origins of Political Violence,” World Politics 63: 2 (2011), 203–245;
and Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–08 (New Delhi:
People’s Publishing House, 1973), 465–492. Leonard A. Gordon, Bengal:
The Nationalist Movement 1876–1940 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1974); Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in
Bengal 1875–1927 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Tanika
Sarkar, Bengal 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1987) also include much valuable analysis of the revolutionaries.
7. H. J. Twynam and R. E. A. Ray, Enquiry into Temporary Establishments of
the Central and District Intelligence Branches of the Bengal Police (Alipore:
Bengal Government Press, 1936), 9–10. A copy of this report is in
L/S&G/7/231, APAC BL.
8. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of
MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009); and Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of
the Secret Intelligence Service (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). MI5 and MI6
came into existence in 1909 as part of one organization, known as the
Secret Service Bureau.
18 M. SILVESTRI
9. Kate O’Malley, “Indian Political Intelligence (IPI): The monitoring of real

and possible danger?” in Eunan O’Halpin, Robert Armstrong and Jane
Ohlmeyer, eds., Intelligence, Statecraft and International Power. Historical
Studies XXV. (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2006),
175–185; and Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections,
1919–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). The ques-
tion of the respective jurisdictions of MI5 and SIS was resolved in 1931,
when the former was given responsibility for security intelligence within
the British Empire and commonwealth, while the latter was restricted to
operating three miles outside British territories. Calder Walton, Empire of
Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire
(London: HarperPress, 2013), 23–24.
10. Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence
and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924 (London: Frank Cass,
1995).
11. Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations
of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008); and Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services
and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 2008).
12. As Martin Thomas concludes, “Intelligence and empire were inextricably
linked in a symbiotic relationship, the growth of one nourishing the con-
solidation of the other.” Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 13.
13. Emphasis in original. Walton, Empire of Secrets, 1.
14. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, 117–122; and Jeffery, MI6, 245–248.
By 1925, MI5, for example, had only four percent of the staff it had pos-
sessed at the end of the Great War. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, 122.
15. The vast majority of these officers were Indian. These numbers include
both permanent and temporary appointments to the IB. Twynam and Ray,
Central and District Intelligence Branches, 17 and 64.
16. Patrick Major and Christopher R. Moran, eds., Spooked: Britain, Empire
and Intelligence Since 1945 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009); Rory
Cormac, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of
British Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); and
Walton, Empire of Secrets.
17. Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 1.
18. Kris Manjapra, “Introduction,” in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds.,
Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 10.
19. For Bengali revolutionaries’ engagement with Irish republicanism, see
Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 46–75.
20. Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and
Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017), 88–141.
21. Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah, “Introduction: The
Internationalism of the Moment—South Asia and the Contours of the
Interwar World,” in Raza, Roy and Zachariah, eds., The Internationalist
Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and Worldviews, 1917–1939 (New Delhi;
Thousand Oaks, CA; London and Singapore: Sage, 2015), viii. Emphasis
in original.
22. Philip Murphy, “Creating a Commonwealth Intelligence Culture: The
View from Central Africa 1945–1965,” Intelligence and National Security
17: 3 (2002), 131–162.
23. For the conviction that British anticolonial counter-insurgency represented
an exemplary model to be followed in the deployment of intelligence and
military force against insurgents, see Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of
Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British
Empire (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2017), 1–9; and
David French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency 1945–67 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–7.
24. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social
Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
25. Tegart memoir, 38–41 and 68–69.
26. Patrick A. Kelley, Imperial Secrets: Remapping the Mind of Empire
(Washington, DC: National Defense Intelligence College, 2008); and
Satia, Spies in Arabia.
27. O’Malley, “Indian Political Intelligence,” 175.
28. Simon Ball, “The Assassination Culture of Imperial Britain, 1909–1979,”
Historical Journal 56 (2013), 231–256. Ball identifies 17 “significant”
imperial assassinations between 1909 and 1979. Of the nine such assassina-
tions up to 1940, seven either took place in India or involved Indian colo-
nial officials; four of the seven were in Bengal.
29. Ball, “Assassination Culture,” 239. The civil-military campaign against the
Bengali revolutionaries will be discussed in Chap. 3.
30. Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British
Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11.
31. Burton, Trouble with Empire, 218.
32. Harald Fischer-Tiné, Shyamji Krishnavarna: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-
Imperialism (London: Routledge, 2014); Michele L. Louro and Carolien
Stolte, “The Meerut Conspiracy Case in Comparative and International
Perspective,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle
East 33: 3 (2013), 310–315; Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the
20 M. SILVESTRI
Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow

the British Empire (Berkeley and London: University of California Press,
2011); and Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance and Indian
Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014).
33. Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence,
Image, Voice and Text (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2015), 3.
34. Mark Condos, The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial
Power in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
35. For a discussion of this, see Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 245–247. The
present author had to submit his notes on confidential files to the
Intelligence Branch and Home Department of the Government of West
Bengal for approval during his research in the West Bengal State Archives
during the mid-1990s.
36. Charles Trevor, Drums of Asia (London: Lovat Dickson, 1934).
37. Emphasis in original. “Explanatory Notes of the Reasons for the Suggestion
in Regard to the Re-Editing of ‘Drums of Asia,’” L/P&J/12/469, APAC
BL.
38. IPI observed that Lajpat Rai, “although an extreme Nationalist and at
times in his career, a seditionist, can scarcely be described as brainless. The
passage would give much offense in Nationalist circles in India.” IPI,
“Passages Open to Possible Objection” [July 1933] L/P&J/12/469,
APAC BL.
39. Ramnath, Haj to Utopia.
40. “Explanatory Notes of the Reasons for the Suggestion in Regard to the
Re-Editing of ‘Drums of Asia’,” L/P&J/12/469, APAC BL.
41. Clauson to Seton, 4 August 1933, L/P&J/12/469, APAC BL; and
Trevor, Drums of Asia, np.
42. For the “amateurish” and “ineffective” nature of the police, see David
Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–1947 (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 230. For police surveillance of colonial society, see
Erin M. Giuliani, “Strangers in the Village? Colonial Policing in Rural
Bengal, 1861–1892,” Modern Asian Studies 49: 5 (2015), 1378–1404;
Radha Kumar, “Seeing Like a Policeman: Everyday Violence in British
India, c. 1900–1950,” in Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck, eds.,
Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 131–149; and Radhika Singha, “Punished by
Surveillance: Policing ‘Dangerousness’ in Colonial India, 1872–1918,”
Modern Asian Studies 49: 2 (2015), 241–269.
43. C. F. Andrews to Lord Hardinge, Viceroy, 1 August 1915, 90/1/93,
Hardinge Papers, Cambridge University Library [CUL].
44. Lord Carmichael, Governor of Bengal, to Lord Hardinge, 20 August

1915, 90/1/138, Hardinge Papers, CUL.
45. Tim Harper, “Singapore, 1915, and the Birth of the Asian Underground,”
Modern Asian Studies 47: 6 (2013), 1782–1811.
46. Percival Griffiths, To Guard My People: A History of the Indian Police
(London: Ernest Benn, 1971), 269.
PART I
Policing Revolutionary Terrorism in

Bengal
CHAPTER 2
The “Bomb Cult” and “Criminal Tribes”:

Revolutionaries and the Origins of Police
Intelligence in Colonial Bengal
In 1938, a time when the Bengali revolutionary movement had been

seemingly defeated by British intelligence and security forces, and thou-
sands of suspected revolutionaries were being released from detention, a
book appeared in London that purported to reveal the darkest secrets of
“Bengali terrorism.” The book was titled Mysterious India; little is known
about its author, “Moki Singh,” who may have been the Indian corre-
spondent for the arch-conservative Morning Post or a retired European
member of the colonial service, possibly a former policeman.1 Mysterious
India presented various “evils” and “perversions,” including the Thugs,
the Moplah rebels, communal rioters, drug smugglers, and “anarchists.”
The lurid panorama of Indian society and religion depicted in the book
was so unremittingly negative that it remains banned in India today.
Mysterious India displays not only imperial anxieties about Indian crime
and revolutionary politics, however, but also the ways in which these anxi-
eties impacted the newly emergent intelligence apparatus in Bengal.
Although this new intelligence system was to be “modern”—rational,
objective, and systematic in its analysis—police intelligence officers in real-
ity sought to understand “Bengali terrorism” through a framework of
colonial assumptions stretching back to the first half of the nine-
teenth century.
Although Mysterious India acknowledged that Bengali revolutionaries
drew inspiration from other revolutionary movements (what it termed
“the methods and aims of Irish gunmen and Bolshevik murderers”), it

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_2
26 M. SILVESTRI
presented their activities as deeply rooted in Indian religion and Indian

criminality, something static and unchanging. The “bomb cult” of Bengal
is described as a flaming up in “a blaze of perverted patriotism.” Bengali
“bomb worshippers” combined the worship of Kali, “the most savage and
horrible of the Hindu goddesses,” with “an appeal to the lowest and most
sadistic passions in the youth’s body. The filthiest literature, beside the
most extreme, is circulated among them, and they become depraved phys-
ically, mentally, and morally.” Twentieth-century anarchists ranked with
nineteenth-century thugs and dacoits (gang robbers) in embodying “the
more terrible aspects of Hinduism.”2
The “anarchists” of Bengal were described not only as depraved reli-
gious fanatics but also as criminals. Bengal, especially its capital Calcutta,
was not only a center of sedition but also of criminality. “Calcutta has
always been a hot-bed of crime,” Singh wrote, “and as a centre of student-
sedition it has the most notorious name.” It was the home not only of the
“Indian agitator,” but also of “his dupe, the gangster.” Drug and arms
smuggling, “perverted” religion, “sadistic” bomb worshipping, thugs and
dacoits, and moral and physical degeneration thus blended together in a
kaleidoscopic vision of the Indian underworld.
Though in some ways remarkable, Mysterious India was far from unique
in its portrait of “Bengali terrorism” as something depraved, fanatical, and
criminal, a distortion of the Hindu religion and ideas of national libera-
tion. Such portrayals appeared in Anglo-Indian fiction dating back to
period before the Great War. Edmund Candler’s novel Siri Ram
Revolutionist (1913) features a character known as “the Swami” who tries
to spread the “Bengal system” of revolution to the Punjab.3 In the novel
Black Velvet: A Drama of India and the Bomb Cult (1934) by the former
Indian Army officer George Macmunn, the director of the Intelligence
Bureau watches “constantly to see if Thuggism, stirred by the spirit of
Kali, should arise.” The shadowy leader of the revolutionaries, an Indian
educated at Balliol College, Oxford, extols “the glorious work of defying
the accursed British Government” at a meeting in a Hindu temple where
worshippers cry out “Jai Jai Kalimai! Jai Jai Kalimai!” (Victory to
Mother Kali), “a cry of fierce religious intolerance, to which human life
mattered little.”4 A similar scene appears in Gunga Din (1939), a film
whose depiction of nineteenth-century thugs is deeply colored by
twentieth-century Indian revolutionary nationalism.5
These portraits of Bengali revolutionaries as religious fanatics and
debased criminals featured not only in popular novels and films but also in
2 THE “BOMB CULT” AND “CRIMINAL TRIBES”: REVOLUTIONARIES… 27
ostensibly more sober and critical assessments by imperial officials. The

report of the Sedition Committee (or Rowlatt Committee), established in
1917 to investigate “criminal conspiracies connected with the revolution-
ary movement in India,” characterized revolutionary “outrages” as “the
outcome of a widespread but essentially single movement of perverted
religion and equally perverted patriotism.” Former Governor of Bengal
Lord Ronaldshay devoted a chapter titled “Perverted Patriotism” to the
revolutionaries in his book The Heart of Aryavarta: A Study of the
Psychology of the Indian Unrest (1925). “There is no sadder chapter in the
history of modern India,” he wrote, “than that which recounts the callous
perversion of the emotional enthusiasm of a number of the young men of
Bengal by the organizers of this criminal conspiracy.” One of the most
influential treatments of Indian revolutionary organizations, former
Calcutta Police Commissioner Sir Charles Tegart’s 1932 Royal Empire
Society lecture on “Terrorism in India,” described Bengali terrorist orga-
nizations as “based on perverted religion and an equally perverted patrio-
tism, which have persevered to this day.”6 Tegart went on to discuss, in
language which was to be replicated in Mysterious India, how the “dupes”
of terrorist leaders, “the rank and file, of whom I know many hundreds,
present a pitiful spectacle. Their immature minds are saturated with hatred
of the Government and they are induced to commit crimes as much by the
perversion of their good qualities as by playing on their weaknesses.”
Tegart cited the elaborate vows to the goddess Kali that revolutionary
organizations had compelled new recruits to take as an example of the
Bengali terrorists’ “perversion,” calling it a “remarkable system for the
progressive enthrallment of the initiates.”7
The persistence of this colonial categorization of the Bengali revolu-
tionaries as religious fanatics and criminal elements is somewhat surprising
given that “Bengali terrorism” was an avowedly modern movement which
aimed at radical political change. In many ways, the revolutionaries con-
founded colonial stereotypes of Bengalis as an “effeminate” people who
were not one of the “martial races” of India. As Durba Ghosh notes, the
colonial categorization of the revolutionaries as bhadralok dacoits was itself
an oxymoron: upper-caste, elite Hindus were not supposed to be commit-
ting armed robberies in the dead of night.8 The revolutionaries posed a
new challenge to colonial rule, not only in their use of political assassina-
tion but also in their anticolonial ideology, which drew inspiration from
European anarchists, revolutionaries, and nationalists. Prior to the Great
War, revolutionary networks in Asia, North America, and Europe were
28 M. SILVESTRI
already producing sophisticated anticolonial propaganda and distributing

it to a global public audience.9 The police in colonial Bengal were forced
in turn to adapt to the rise of the revolutionary movement with new and
specialized branches of the police devoted to intelligence work. The
Bengal Police Intelligence Branch (IB) and the Calcutta Police Special
Branch developed expertise in cypher codes, photography, and other areas
of forensic investigation; took on responsibilities for censorship of new
media such as cinema; and authored detailed and voluminous reports on
the membership and activities of revolutionary groups.
Yet the rise of the revolutionary movement in Bengal also prompted
responses and comparisons that related more closely to nineteenth-century
colonialism than to a modern, transnational revolutionary movement. In
1909, the police in Eastern Bengal and Assam reported that Hindu reli-
gious mendicants, or sadhus and sannyasis, traditionally regarded by colo-
nial authorities as mysterious figures who spread sedition and unrest, had
been moving throughout the country during the previous two years.10
During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, colonial authorities believed that
rebels had used mendicants to travel around north India spreading the
revolt, and the Eastern Bengal and Assam police believed that nationalists
and revolutionaries were doing the same half a century later.11 In 1907,
police across India recorded the circulation from village to village of the
unleavened flatbreads known as chapattis, something that had also
occurred prior to the outbreak of the Indian Rebellion of 1857.12 As the
Bengal revolutionary movement grew in size and strength over the next
several years, a military officer advised the Viceroy, Lord Minto, to look
back to the experience of the early-nineteenth-century British campaign
against the thugs, who were recalled in a similar light as organized net-
works of religiously inspired murderers. “These murder clubs are, as Lord
Morley says, like the old Thugs,” wrote Colonel Arthur Bigge, “and can
only be reached by expert and energetic police.”13
As the above comments about thugs, wandering holy men preaching
sedition and a repeat of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857, illustrate, the rise of
new modes of anticolonial opposition in Bengal prior to the Great War at
times sparked responses from colonial authorities that drew upon older
colonial fears of rebellion and resistance. The revolutionaries became the
subject of what C. A. Bayly termed “information panics,” which were a
marked feature of the British Raj until the end of colonial rule.14
Furthermore, these fears did not merely reflect colonial anxieties but had
practical application to colonial police and intelligence work against the
revolutionaries. While subsequent chapters will explore the functioning of

what was one of the most highly developed intelligence structures in the
interwar British Empire and trace the movements and interactions of intel-
ligence officers and revolutionaries around the globe, it is important to
understand at the outset the older roots of police and intelligence opera-
tions directed against the Bengal revolutionaries.
There are two reasons why such a focus leads to a better understanding
of British efforts to curb anticolonial activity in the first half of the twenti-
eth century. First, it allows better comprehension of how imperial intelli-
gence operated within its historical context. As James Hevia has argued,
historians must avoid the teleological trap of viewing intelligence efforts in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as “inferior” predecessors to
modern intelligence practices. Rather, we need to be sensitive to “the
diverse techniques and technologies available at a particular moment.”15
In addition to techniques and technologies, we need to consider how
colonial assumptions about topics such as Indian crime, caste, and ethnic-
ity influenced these intelligence officers as they worked to understand and
defeat the Bengali revolutionary movement. As we will see, deeply held
colonial beliefs about the nature of Indian criminality helped to shape the
attitudes of colonial intelligence officers to the revolutionaries as they
established their own methodologies and archive of knowledge about them.
Although some Bengal police officers attended army intelligence
courses, few received any formal training in intelligence work. These offi-
cers were, however, trained to be colonial police officers, and the colonial
context was something that cannot be separated from their intelligence
work. Intelligence officers typically began work as district officers dealing
with “ordinary” criminal matters.16 Particularly in the early years of the
revolutionary movement prior to the Great War, these officers handled
work relating to both Indian crime and the policing of the new revolution-
ary movement, sometimes moving back and forth between them. F. C.
Daly, who served as the head of the Intelligence Branch prior to the Great
War, for example, authored not only the first comprehensive imperial anal-
ysis of the history of the Bengali revolutionary movement but also a man-
ual detailing the “criminal classes” in the province.17 The latter featured
analyses of “tribes” believed to be hereditary criminals from birth, who
had purportedly succeeded the thugs as the primary source of Indian
criminality in the late nineteenth century. Although Daly added the dis-
claimer that his work was confined to “matters of practical importance
from a police point of view,” he also sought to distill the ethnographic
30 M. SILVESTRI
knowledge contained in H. H. Risley’s Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891),

one of the most prominent ethnographic texts of late-nineteenth-century
colonial administration, into a practical guide for police officers.18
In his recent study of the 1919 Amritsar massacre, Kim Wagner argues
that there is “a level of continuity in the forms and functions of colonial
violence” from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The prospect of a
repeat of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 lay behind the deployment of vio-
lence against Indians in the late nineteenth century and the massacre at
Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919.19 We can detect similar con-
tinuities in the practices of police intelligence in colonial Bengal; in spite
of the new modes of opposition that police intelligence officers and colo-
nial officials faced before, during, and after the Great War, comparisons of
upper-caste Hindu Bengali revolutionaries to thugs, dacoits, and criminal
tribes still seemed relevant. Key officers of the intelligence agencies in
Bengal were involved in the creation of modern British intelligence within
the British Empire and the wider world in subsequent decades. While
intelligence operations were intended to be rational and objective forms of
investigation, they were also deeply marked by colonial stereotypes of
crime, criminality, and sedition, and this perspective needs to be incorpo-
rated into the story of British imperial intelligence in these decades.
Accordingly, this chapter will explore how colonial thinking and colonial
policies directed against thugs, dacoits, sadhus, and criminal tribes influ-
enced the policing of the Bengali revolutionary movement. Before mov-
ing to these issues, however, it is necessary to establish who the Bengal
revolutionaries were, as well as the composition of the intelligence agen-
cies that opposed them.
1 The Bengal Revolutionaries

Colonial authorities subsumed diverse anticolonial movements under the
category of “terrorism.” These included lone assassins such as Madan Lal
Dhingra, a young Indian who in July 1909 assassinated Sir William Curzon
Wylie, Political A.D.C. to Secretary of State for India John Morley, at the
Imperial Institute in London.20 The category of “terrorism” also included
the transnational revolutionary organization known as the Ghadar Party,
based in North America, and the Hindustan Socialist Republican
Association (HSRA), both of which blended eclectic intellectual influ-
ences of nationalism, republicanism, and socialism.21 Although the most
famous member of the HSRA, Bhagat Singh, was executed for the
a ssassination of a British police officer in the Punjab, he achieved iconic

status for his non-violent protests, notably a prison hunger strike, and he
regarded violence as a less important anticolonial tactic than the organiza-
tion of workers and peasants. “I am not a terrorist, I am a revolutionary,”
he wrote in one of his final letters from prison.22
The most sustained violent nationalist campaign, however, took place
in the province of Bengal, and in the three decades that followed the parti-
tion of the province in 1905, revolutionaries conspired to assassinate
British and Indian colonial officials and their agents and informers, and to
commit robberies to obtain funds and accumulate arms and ammunition
in preparation for a mass uprising. The vast majority of the revolutionaries
were Bengali Hindus, particularly from the bhadralok or “respectable
classes.” Bengal became both the focus of British fears of Indian terrorism
and the place where the most concerted police intelligence efforts
attempted to eradicate revolutionary activity.23 By the 1930s, colonial offi-
cials considered Bengal to be the “home and breeding ground of terror-
ism,” while intelligence reports noted the numerous links that Bengali
revolutionaries had with similar groups elsewhere in India and overseas.24
Two major events prior to the Great War, one internal to India and one
external, were catalysts to the rise of the Bengali revolutionary movement:
the Partition of Bengal and the Russo-Japanese War. Designed to blunt
the force of nationalism in Bengal, the partition took effect on 16 October
1905 and created two separate provinces: Bengal and Eastern Bengal and
Assam.25 The Partition of Bengal led to one of the first mass nationalist
movements in Indian history: the Swadeshi movement of 1905–1908.
Swadeshi (“own country”) demonstrators not only attempted to reverse
partition, but to boycott British imported goods and replace them with
indigenous Indian products.26 Although strikes and demonstrations
achieved some success, there were also limits to the movement’s political
mobilization, particularly among Bengali Muslims, the majority popula-
tion in Eastern Bengal and Assam, who by and large did not oppose parti-
tion. As Swadeshi failed to achieve its goals, increasing numbers of Bengali
nationalists came to believe that only revolutionary activity rather than
mass agitation could bring about political change in colonial India.
The Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War reinforced this convic-
tion. The demonstration that a non-Western nation was capable of defeat-
ing one of the great powers of Europe reverberated throughout the
colonial world.27 For Bengali bhadralok, the war confirmed that Western
ideas of Asian racial inferiority were a myth and prompted calls for armed
32 M. SILVESTRI
resistance against British rule. The authors of the Sedition Committee

Report noted how Indian nationalists had been “electrified and amazed by
the victories of Japan over Russia at a time when within this country cir-
cumstances occasioned by certain Government measures”—in other
words, the Partition of Bengal—“favored the development” of revolu-
tionary organizations.28 As one intelligence report put it, “the successes
gained by the Japanese in their war with Russia had inflamed the minds of
the young men of Bengal, who saw no reason why they should not be
equally successful against the hated foreigner.”29
The Bengali nationalist reaction to Japan’s victory over Russia also
served as the culmination of decades of anxieties among bhadralok about
the “manliness” of Bengali Hindus. This was in itself largely a response to
colonial stereotypes about the “unmanly” nature of the Bengali “babu.”
As Tapan Raychaudhuri has observed, “the Bengali intelligentsia was the
first Asian social group of any size whose mental world was transformed
through its interactions with the West.”30 While Bengali bhadralok enthu-
siastically embraced Western education and imperial service in India, by
the late nineteenth century an increasing number harbored resentment
against the colonial government, due to limits on Indian advancement in
government positions and negative racial stereotypes of the Western-
educated “Bengali babu.”31 In this period the British came to perceive
Bengalis as weak and effeminate, the obverse to the robust masculinity of
the ideal British imperial male of the late nineteenth century.32 As a result,
in addition to playing a prominent role in early nationalist politics through
the Indian National Congress (established in 1885), Bengali bhadralok
also increasingly emphasized physical culture and the improvement of the
Bengali Hindu “race.” Cultural festivals emphasized athletic competition
in both European and Indian sports, and Bengalis who displayed martial
abilities—in defiance of colonial stereotypes—were lauded as heroes.33 In
the first years of the twentieth century, numerous secret societies devel-
oped in Calcutta, with a cultural nationalist orientation and often focused
on physical training and traditional martial arts using the lathi or staff.34
The combined effect of the Russo-Japanese War, the Partition of Bengal
and the failure of the Swadeshi movement led to an explosive growth in
these proto-revolutionary societies. In 1902, an organization known as
the Anushilan Samiti, or “cultural society,” was founded in Calcutta; while
originally focused on spiritual development and social work, the group’s
name was ultimately to become “a byword for revolutionary terrorism in
Bengal.”35 By 1907, over 500 branches were in existence. Revolutionary
newspapers such as the English-language Bande Mataram, edited by

Aurobindo Ghose, and the Bengali Yugantar, edited by his brother
Barindra, urged the formation of secret societies and counseled would-be
revolutionaries on tactics. In 1906, an all-Bengal meeting of revolutionary
leaders took place, and in the following year, revolutionaries began to
strike at targets of the colonial state, leading to an unsuccessful effort to
derail the train of the Governor of Bengal.36 On 30 April 1908, two revo-
lutionaries threw a bomb at the carriage of District Magistrate Douglas
Kingsford, who had ordered whipping as a punishment for Swadeshi dem-
onstrators. The bomb exploded and killed the wife and daughter of a local
Anglo-Irish barrister, Pringle Kennedy; Kingsford was unhurt.
The bungled assassination attempt drew the attention of colonial
authorities to the existence of the revolutionary secret societies. Two days
later, the police searched a house in the Calcutta suburb of Manicktolla
that the revolutionaries had used as a base. Thirty-seven revolutionaries
were brought to trial; fourteen were found guilty, all but three of whom
were sentenced to transportation to the Andaman Islands. The Alipore
Bomb Trial marked the beginning of three decades of conflict between
revolutionaries and the police in Bengal. Revolutionary activity intensified
during the Great War, when revolutionaries sought to collaborate with the
German government through the Ghadar Party to import arms in support
of a revolution in India. By 1915, the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch
observed that the revolutionaries posed an “unparalleled danger.”37 In
1915, the seizure of the S.S. Maverick, a ship intended to transport arms
to India, by Dutch colonial authorities in Batavia, and the passage of the
Defence of India Act, which allowed for the detention without trial of
suspected revolutionaries, blunted the force of the revolutionaries’
campaign.38
But although the Intelligence Branch noted that “the conspiracies were
definitely under control” by 1917, the revolutionary groups reorganized
following a royal amnesty in 1919.39 Many revolutionaries were involved
with Mohandas Gandhi’s first all-India nationalist campaign, the nonco-
operation movement, from 1920 to 1922, and the failure of noncoopera-
tion to achieve its goal of independence led to a revival of revolutionary
sentiment. A younger generation of nationalists drew inspiration from a
new genre of newspaper articles praising the first generation of Bengali
revolutionaries, particularly those who had been killed or executed.
Revolutionaries began a renewed campaign of dacoities, or gang robber-
ies, in order to raise funds, and focused intensively on the assassination of
34 M. SILVESTRI
police officers. While they differed over the timing of activities, with
younger revolutionaries in particular pressing for immediate attacks on
colonial officials, there was broad agreement that their tactics should be
expanded into “a plan of campaign on a much wider basis.”40 While the
1924 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance (enacted into law the
following year as the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act) allowing for
detention without trial neutralized the revolutionary groups for the
remainder of the decade, the revolutionaries began their most sustained
campaign of anticolonial resistance in April 1930, a month after the begin-
ning of the Indian National Congress’ civil disobedience campaign.
The revolutionary groups were more frequently disunited than allied.
While the Dacca Anushilan Samiti, particularly prior to the Great War,
featured a centralized structure, other groups remained loosely affiliated
groups of cells. Jugantar, the name colonial authorities gave to revolution-
aries in western Bengal, represented an alliance among different revolu-
tionary groups rather than a single organization.41 From the British
perspective, the acts of the revolutionaries nonetheless achieved ominous
results. In December 1912, Bengalis affiliated with north Indian revolu-
tionary organizations threw bombs that wounded the Viceroy of India,
Lord Hardinge, during a ceremonial entrance to Delhi. Less than two
years later, revolutionaries stole a consignment of fifty Mauser pistols and
46,000 rounds of ammunition from the gunmaking firm of Rodda and
Co. in Calcutta. The weapons were used to carry out a series of more than
fifty dacoities and assassinations over the next several years.
In 1930, perhaps the annus mirabilis of Bengali terrorism, revolution-
aries assassinated the Inspector General of the Bengal Police; carried out
an attack on the Writers’ Building, the seat of the Bengal Government in
Calcutta; and, most spectacularly, attempted to re-stage the 1916 Easter
Rising. On the evening of Good Friday, 18 April 1930, sixty-four revolu-
tionaries, most of whom were armed and dressed in military-style khaki,
attacked and seized weapons from the armories of the police and Auxiliary
Force of India in the port town of Chittagong in eastern Bengal.42 After
this act of intra-imperial emulation of Irish revolutionary tactics, which
became known as the Chittagong Armoury Raid, the terrorist campaign
in eastern Bengal began to approximate an insurgency in which the revo-
lutionaries commanded widespread support from the local population. In
spite of the deployment of British and Indian army troops and the use of
military officers as special intelligence officers, all of the raiders were not
captured until more than three years later.43
How many revolutionaries were engaged in these activities? In 1910,

the Government of Bengal estimated that close to 6000 Bengalis were
involved with terrorist activities.44 Intelligence reports from the early
1930s, when the revolutionary terrorist movement reached its peak, sug-
gest similar numbers. From 1930 to 1932, almost 3000 Bengalis were
arrested in connection with revolutionary terrorism.45 From 1930 through
June 1935, 540 individuals were convicted of terrorist-related offenses;
another 2781 were subjected to preventative detention; and an additional
1886 had their movements restricted by anti-terrorist legislation.46
The revolutionaries generally enjoyed sympathy from the Hindu and
nationalist population of Bengal. Recent historical research has enhanced
our understanding of how Indian revolutionaries, branded as “terrorists”
by colonial authorities, engaged with and impacted non-violent national-
ism and also enjoyed broad popular support.47 Even among nationalists
who might have disparaged their methods, the revolutionaries were widely
admired for their bravery and for their resistance to colonial rule, which
challenged, as discussed above, derogatory stereotypes of the “unmanli-
ness” of Bengali Hindus. Khudiram Bose, a seventeen-year-old executed
in 1908 for throwing the bomb intended for District Magistrate Douglas
Kingsford, became one of the greatest contemporary nationalist heroes.
“Khudiram Day” and “Bhagat Singh Day” were both celebrated in Bengal
in the 1930s and 1940s.48
The revolutionaries were also highly effective in mobilizing popular
support and, in the words of Shukla Sanyal, “legitimizing their movement
in the political arena” through the production of a voluminous under-
ground pamphlet literature.49 After the revolutionary groups reorganized
following the Great War, they produced numerous pamphlets and leaflets
extolling revolutionaries who had been killed or executed. In 1924, the
Bengal Police intercepted packets of a leaflet mailed from Calcutta and
intended for distribution to schools. The leaflet, one of several from the
period with the identical title of “Bande Mataram” (“Hail Motherland”),
praised Prafulla Chaki, who had accompanied Khudiram Bose on his
bombing mission; Kanai Lal Dutta, who had assassinated a fellow revolu-
tionary who had turned King’s Evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial; and
Jotin Mukherjee, one of the leading figures in the Indo-German effort to
import arms to India, who died in a gun battle with the Bengal Police in
1915.50 Many revolutionaries also participated in Gandhi’s noncoopera-
tion movement or assumed local leadership positions in the Indian
National Congress. The Intelligence Branch contended that this assisted
36 M. SILVESTRI
“them internally in the matter of recruitment and organisation, and exter-

nally in the matter of public sympathy.” The IB concluded in 1933 that
“the time was to come when there were few districts in the province where
terrorists were not represented on local Congress committees.”51 From
the perspective of colonial intelligence officers, the interconnections
between revolutionary groups and other nationalist, anticolonial, and rad-
ical organizations and individuals in Bengal, elsewhere in India, within the
British Empire, and in the wider world represented a constant threat.
2 Intelligence and Empire

The resilience and adaptability of Indian revolutionaries and the colonial
anxieties that they engendered forced authorities to develop new and
expanded intelligence organizations to counter revolutionary activity.
While these intelligence organizations—the Bengal Police Intelligence
Branch; the Intelligence Bureau of the Government of India; and Indian
Political Intelligence in London—dealt with the new transnational and
global threats posed by Indian revolutionaries, they were not entirely new
creations. Rather, they were staffed with colonial officers who, with little
background in intelligence work, relied upon existing systems of colonial
information-gathering and policing.
The intelligence agencies that came to be known in interwar India as
the “security services” were therefore positioned in what Bayly refers to as
the information order of colonial India. Within India, both civil and mili-
tary intelligence was integral to imperial conquest and the maintenance of
British power.52 Colonial intelligence determined the policy choices made
by colonial administrators and made possible the maintenance of empire
by relatively small military forces.53 Yet this acquisition of “colonial knowl-
edge,” in spite of the scale and scope of imperial record-keeping and anal-
ysis, was never comprehensive or absolute. As Bayly argues, “the British
‘empire of information’ rested on shaky foundations.”54 If anything, the
information-gathering capacity of the British imperial state in India was
probably growing weaker in the decades after the Indian Rebellion of
1857 shattered British intelligence networks. In spite of, or perhaps
because of, the impressive volume of official knowledge produced about
India, panics about a lack of knowledge of Indian society characterized the
British Raj from the late nineteenth century onward.55
This concern was illustrated by the British campaign against the phe-
nomena known as thuggee in the early nineteenth century, which brought
to light both the degree of knowledge that the British believed they had
obtained over Indian society and the gaps in that knowledge. In the British
view, bands of highway robbers, known as thugs, constituted a hereditary
criminal fraternity motivated by religious beliefs that supported waylaying
and murdering unwary travelers in northern India, usually by ritual stran-
gulation. By some accounts, thugs were alleged to have killed over one
million travelers in the early nineteenth century as a sacrifice to the god-
dess Kali. In this highly distorted view, thugs were part of a mysterious
criminal underworld, the destruction of which was represented as one of
the great triumphs of the consolidation of British rule in India in the nine-
teenth century. “A few Englishmen,” wrote the East India Company offi-
cial and historian J. W. Kaye, “…have purged India of this great
pollution.”56
The Thagi & Dakaiti Department, established in 1838, was considered
by British and later Indian intelligence officers to be the foundation of
modern police intelligence in India.57 As Kim Wagner has written, “the
ability of colonial officers to penetrate the secrets of the Indian under-
world was regarded as the finest validation of their complete knowledge of
the land.”58 Although W. H. Sleeman, the first superintendent of the
Thagi & Dakaiti Department, declared in 1839 that thuggee had been
eradicated, the department had by that time already shifted its focus to
other forms of collective criminal activity such as dacoity and poisoning
conspiracies.59 By the 1870s, the department was responsible for “the col-
lection of important intelligence relating to crime throughout India gen-
erally.”60 Additionally, in 1887 the General Superintendent of the
department was made responsible for “the collection of secret and politi-
cal intelligence” from provincial governments.61 Thus, in the late-
nineteenth-century incarnation of the Thagi & Dakaiti Department, the
functions of political intelligence and the suppression of distinctively
“Indian” forms of criminality were closely intertwined.
In 1876, the first provincial intelligence branch was established in the
Punjab to collect and disseminate “confidential and secret information.”62
At the request of the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, officers were appointed in
each province to monitor “‘all sources of information regarding foreign
emissaries, intrigues, or unusual political or social phenomena.’”63
Provincial intelligence-gathering was bolstered in the following decade at
a time of heightened British concerns about the Russian intervention in
India. The specific event that prompted these fears was the arrival in India
of Duleep Singh, the son of Ranjit Singh, who had built a powerful Sikh
38 M. SILVESTRI
kingdom in the Punjab before his death in 1839. After the Punjab was
annexed by the British in the following decade, Duleep Singh was forced
to renounce his claim to the throne and was raised in England. In the late
1880s, he attempted to reclaim his throne with Russian aid, and his arrival
in the French enclave of Pondicherry in eastern India in 1887 prompted
the establishment of provincial special branches of the police using the
model of the Punjab.64
By the late nineteenth century, there was a degree of coordination of
police intelligence work across India. This is illustrated in a Thagi &
Dakaiti Department abstract from 1888, in which weekly reports covered
a wide scope of material, including foreign visitors, Indians regarded as
“suspicious,” political movements, popular feeling, religious agitation,
arms smuggling, known criminals, kine-killing (the killing of cattle), and
reports of desertion from or people preaching disaffection to the army.
“Dalip Singh Intrigues” feature in almost every edition. For three months,
the department and provincial Special Branches monitored the move-
ments of one John Murphy MacDermott, an Irish-American bookseller
who was suspected of preaching rebellion during his travels across India.
Descriptions of MacDermott and an associate were circulated to Special
Branches across India, alongside reports on the impact of MacDermott’s
talk of Indo-Irish solidarity, such as a “strong” newspaper article that
stressed “how similar is the down-trodden position of the people of India
with that of the Irish” and outlined “how by organization, combination
and dynamite the Irish have been successful in getting their grievances
redressed.”65
In Spring 1888, the General Superintendent of Thagi & Dakaiti met
with the Inspector Generals of the Indian Police, who advocated annual
police conferences. One IG commented that the changing circumstances
of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century had created a greater need
for police cooperation across the sub-continent: “India has changed and is
changing much: the tendency of crime is to adapt itself to the conditions
of the country and each Province is no longer an isolated unit of adminis-
tration. Instead of local crime we now have widespread organizations, and
criminals avail themselves freely of Railway, Post Office, and Telegraph.
Every year it becomes more and more necessary that we should all work
together and keep up constant touch to cope with crime.”66
At the same time as the Thagi & Dakaiti Department and provincial
police forces were becoming increasingly concerned about transnational
intrigues and the use of modern technology by criminals, Indian c riminality
was coming to be categorized as hereditary and determined by caste,

rather than, as in the pre-colonial era, a constellation of different factors.67
The so-called criminal tribes, groups believed to be hereditary criminals
from birth, succeeded the thugs as the primary source of colonial anxiety
regarding Indian criminality in the late nineteenth century.68 Indeed, the
knowledge of these groups was often traced back to the thugs, whom
colonial officials frequently referenced in arguing for special legislation
directed against them; like the thugs, they were regarded as criminals by
birth. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 allowed for the resettlement and
surveillance of groups designated as “criminal tribes” without right
of appeal.69
In 1903, the Thagi & Dakaiti Department was abolished and replaced
in the following year with the Department of Criminal Intelligence (DCI).
The DCI was intended to be a “modern” intelligence department, headed
by an Indian Civil Service officer, patterned after the Metropolitan Police
Special Branch, and charged with collecting information from newly
established provincial Criminal Investigation Departments.70 Nonetheless,
the legacy of the Thagi & Dakaiti Department’s campaign against thuggee
continued into the twentieth century. As late as the 1940s, the Simla office
of the Intelligence Bureau, as the DCI was restyled following the First
World War, was still referred to colloquially as the “thuggee daftar”
(department).71 More substantively, nineteenth-century legacies of colo-
nial campaigns against collective crime such as thuggee and dacoity and
against the criminal tribes continued to influence the operations of intel-
ligence against Bengali revolutionaries in multiple ways.
3 From Special Branch to Intelligence Branch

As part of the Thagi & Dakaiti Department’s goal of “the collection of
secret and political intelligence” from across India, a Special Branch was
formed in Bengal in the late 1880s. Its birth, however, was far from auspi-
cious. In 1888, Inspector General of Police J. C. Veasey circulated an
ambitious agenda for the gathering of police intelligence in the hopes of
attaining a continuous flow of political information to Calcutta. From the
outset, the role of Indian subordinates in intelligence-gathering was to be
critical, as sub-inspectors were to submit reports to District Superintendents
on subjects dictated by the former, based on both the local situation and
“the capacity and trust worthiness of the subordinate in question.” Veasey
added that “officers should be encouraged to report freely everything,
40 M. SILVESTRI
however apparently trivial, that can have a possible political significance,”

and the circular outlined a broad range of subjects on which intelligence
was to be gathered, including political meetings, religious movements,
“suspicious characters and foreigners,” arms smuggling, and army recruit-
ing. In turn, superintendents were to submit a confidential weekly diary
through local magistrates to the Inspector General’s office.72
Veasey’s scheme emphasized the need for “the cordial co-operation and
interest of all officers in the chain of correspondence” and the important
role of Indian subordinates in intelligence-gathering. Rather than a
renewed flow of confidential intelligence, however, the circular instead
inadvertently revealed the Government of Bengal’s intelligence-gathering
priorities to the Indian public. Veasey’s orders soon appeared in the press,
first in the Indian Mirror and later in vernacular newspapers. While the
circular was marked “confidential,” 600 copies had been printed, which
circulated widely among Indian sub-inspectors. (In addition, five copies of
the 600 were not received from the printers, something that the police did
not notice until the circular was published in Bengal newspapers.) The
circular marked the first time that the Bengal Police had ever been issued
with such confidential orders for intelligence collection, and Veasey admit-
ted afterwards that numbered copies of the circular should have been dis-
tributed solely to District Superintendents, and they in turn should have
been drawn up their own orders for intelligence collection in their dis-
tricts. The Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal observed that the
Inspector General “does not … seem even yet to have grasped the proper
system of circulating confidential instructions to a body like the police.”73
While the Inspector General reassured the Government of Bengal that
the information collected, and to the uses to which it would be put, would
remain confidential, over a decade later it had become clear that the Special
Branch had not fulfilled its original vision of providing intelligence about
a broad range of political, cultural, and social developments. In 1901, the
head of the Special Branch in Bengal, A. E. Stevens, complained that the
Special Branch Abstract for the province was not “so full or as interesting
as it might be.” In response, he re-circulated the original instructions from
1887 to all Magistrates, Deputy Commissioners, and District
Superintendents of Police. To Veasey’s list of topics on which the police
should compile information, he added disputes between zamindars (land-
lords) and tenants, unrest over anti-plague measures, “riots attending
Hindu or Mussalman festivals,” assaults on Indians by Europeans and on
Europeans by Indians, and shootings of Indians by Europeans.74
While Stevens expressed the belief that the police were “better
acquainted now with current events than they ever have been before,” he
stressed the need for the police to report to the Special Branch even events
which they thought to be of purely local interest. “Many a local event,” he
wrote, “which has no more than a passing interest to District Officers who
are acquainted with the circumstances of a case in their own districts,
would, if reported, supply a missing link in the chain of information
required by the Special Branch to write a complete history of the case.”75
Stevens further complained that the Special Branch was receiving “gener-
ally second- or third-hand” information from the Bengal Police and none
from the Calcutta Police.76
Not only did the Special Branch express concerns about the quality of
the information it was receiving from the police of the province but also
about its volume and its ability to safeguard it. In the first twelve years of
its existence, the size of the Special Branch Abstract almost tripled, while
the volume of information it received almost quadrupled.77 In 1901, the
Special Branch requested and obtained an increase in both the number of
clerks (from two to three) and their pay. The Inspector General stressed
the need to fix salaries at a level which would be attractive to clerks “who
can safely be trusted with confidential work.”78
Police intelligence in Bengal at the turn of the twentieth century was
thus characterized by significant gaps, in spite of the effort to impose cen-
tral coordination on intelligence efforts and the range of subjects about
which the police were to be informing the Special Branch. The earliest
activities of the Bengal revolutionaries further illustrated the weakness of
the Bengal Police’s intelligence-gathering apparatus. Although secret soci-
eties, including the Anushilan Samiti, which became the prototype of all
later Bengali revolutionary groups, began to organize in Calcutta as early
as 1902, no knowledge of this seems to have been obtained by the Special
Branch. The establishment of such a society, with its goal of training young
recruits for “ultimate military action,” demonstrated how ill-aligned colo-
nial police were to the emerging radical politics of the new century.79
The travels of Barindra Kumar Ghose, the younger brother of the revo-
lutionary and mystic Aurobindo Ghose, further illustrated the deficiencies
of British intelligence. Barindra had spent time with Aurobindo, already a
prominent nationalist thinker, while he was serving as private secretary to
the Gaekwar of the princely state of Baroda in the early years of the twen-
tieth century. According to a later confession to the police, Barindra trav-
eled through every district and sub-district of Bengal in an effort to
42 M. SILVESTRI
establish a network of “gymnasia, where young men would be brought

together to learn physical exercise and study politics.” Yet after two years,
he had little to show for his efforts, and returned in disgust to Baroda in
1903. Bengal Police intelligence officer F. C. Daly found little reason to
doubt Ghose’s story about his abortive attempt to establish a revolution-
ary network in Bengal, “for it was a story of failure and not put forward in
any mood of vanity.” Yet for Daly, the real significance of Barindra Kumar
Ghose’s tale was the light it shone on the failures of colonial police intel-
ligence. “If his story is true, and I see no reason to doubt it,” he wrote in
the first comprehensive report on the rise of the revolutionary movement
in Bengal, “it is a significant exposure of the lamentable efficiency of the
Police Intelligence Department in those days, that not a trace can be
found in the Police Abstracts indicating that his mission even in a single
instance came to the notice of the police.”80
After Bengali revolutionaries attempted their first assassinations of
colonial officials in 1907, the Governments of Bengal and Eastern Bengal
and Assam were forced to develop new organizations within their Criminal
Investigation Departments (CIDs) to deal exclusively with political crime.
While CIDs had been established in Bengal and in Calcutta in 1905 and
in Eastern Bengal and Assam in 1906 as part of general police reforms
across India, these were small organizations with no official connections to
the already existing Bengal Police Special Branch.81 At first, the colonial
state did not believe that Bengali terrorism would be a long-lasting phe-
nomenon. In 1909, the Bengal Government still envisioned the branch of
the CID deputed to deal with political crime as a “temporary establish-
ment.”82 Initially, the Special Branch was put in charge of investigations
into political crime, and not until the end of 1908 was the number of staff
increased. In the following year, a “Special Department” of the CID was
established under a “Deputy Inspector General in charge of Political
Crime”; in 1913 it was renamed the Intelligence Branch.83
The rapid growth of revolutionary activity before and during the Great
War led to the rapid expansion—and increasing specialization—of the
intelligence apparatus in Bengal. By 1913, the Bengal Police Intelligence
Branch consisted of fifty officers and 127 men, and was divided into four
different sections: a headquarters staff of 100 men, a thirty-four-man
dacoity section, a twenty-two-man bomb and explosive section, and a
twenty-man assassination section. To ensure closer cooperation between
the Intelligence Branch of the Bengal Police and the Special Branch of the
Calcutta Police, during the First World War an Indian Civil Service officer
was appointed to be “in general charge of the operations against revolu-

tionary crime.” In 1917 the IB’s staff was still further increased to fifty-
three officers and 231 men.
The importance of revolutionary nationalism in Bengal meant that the
IB quickly achieved primacy within the CID, although the two branches
remained closely related. At least in theory, the Deputy Inspector General
in charge of the IB remained the supervisor of the CID’s work until
1943, when a separate DIG was appointed to take charge.84 As the revo-
lutionary movement in Bengal continued to challenge the colonial state
over subsequent decades, the Intelligence Branch’s expansion was strik-
ing, particularly given the decrease in size of both MI5 and MI6 during
this era.85 In contrast, the Indian intelligence apparatus, particularly in
Bengal, continued not only to increase in size but also become more
central to colonial rule in the interwar period. Although the vast majority
of the IB’s staff was designated as temporary rather than permanent, the
expansion in numbers at the IB’s headquarters in Calcutta is striking;
from 1917 to 1935, the staff of the IB doubled from just over 300 to
more than 700.
4 Thuggee, Dacoits, Sadhus, and Bengal

“Anarchism”
The Bengal Police intelligence establishment was not only built on the
foundations of nineteenth-century colonial police and surveillance institu-
tions, but also drew upon their practices in seeking to monitor and defeat
the new revolutionary movement. In this fashion, colonial anxieties about
nineteenth-century collective forms of “Indian criminality” were applied
to the policing of revolutionaries in the twentieth century. The British
conception of thuggee provided an analogy for understanding the new
phenomena of revolutionary violence in Bengal. This was particularly true
during the early years of the revolutionary movement, as colonial officials
struggled to categorize and counter a movement they often described,
inaccurately, as “anarchism.”86
In addition to occasional parallels, the police also drew in a more sus-
tained fashion on the practices of colonialism relating to nineteenth-
century “hereditary” Indian criminality and political threats. Former ICS
officer Percival Griffiths, a district magistrate in Bengal during the 1930s,
drew attention to this parallel in his quasi-official history of the Indian
Police. The elaborate intelligence reports produced by British intelligence
44 M. SILVESTRI
officers in the nineteenth century and the voluminous colonial archive on

thuggee were both primarily based on the testimony of informants. In the
case of thuggee, these informants were typically “approvers,” or thugs
who testified about the activities of their colleagues in the hopes of avoid-
ing punishment and obtaining a pardon.87 The range of knowledge col-
lected about thugs from approvers went far beyond what was needed to
convict members of thug gangs and helped to establish the British “mas-
tery” of thuggee of which imperial authors wrote so approvingly.88
The use of approvers remained fundamental to the prosecution of con-
spiracy cases and in particular to the work of the Indian Police in preparing
these cases in the twentieth century.89 Like the policing of thuggee, the
policing of Indian revolutionaries, both in India and overseas, was ulti-
mately dependent on what in modern intelligence terminology is known
as human intelligence. As in the nineteenth-century colonial campaigns
against thugs and dacoits, colonial intelligence and the identification,
detention, and punishment of suspected revolutionaries were ultimately
dependent on the testimony of agents and informers. Griffiths noted that
intelligence officers “to some extent … copied the pattern set by Sleeman
and the old Thagi & Dakaiti Department” in terms of the compilation of
careful case histories and the use of approvers and informers.90 Indeed, the
compilation of “history sheets” on revolutionary suspects was such a fun-
damental part of colonial intelligence work that former Bengal Police
intelligence officer R. E. A. Ray thought it required no mention at all in
Griffith’s history of the Indian Police. “The building up of dossiers was
such a normal procedure,” Ray wrote in his commentary on a draft, “that
perhaps the mention of Sleeman is unnecessary.”91
Bengal Police intelligence officers not only built up “history sheets” on
thousands of revolutionaries, they also developed an extensive archive on
their ideology, inspirations, and actions. This process began prior to the
First World War, as the Intelligence Branch began to create not only files
on individual revolutionaries or revolutionary organizations but on spe-
cialized topics relating to the revolutionaries. The Intelligence Branch
report titled “The Modus Operandi Followed in Political Dakaitis” (1913),
for example, anatomized the gang robberies committed by revolutionaries
with all of the elaborate attention to detail of colonial analyses of
nineteenth-century thugs and dacoits.92 The report noted that the “modus
operandi” of upper-caste Hindu revolutionary dacoits “has developed into
stereotyped lines which, with slight variations for topographical reasons,
are invariably followed.” It delineated in precise detail the composition of
revolutionary dacoit bands and their operations, including details about

their dress, the implements they used (the “good workmanship” of their
chisels was noted), the preferred colors of the masks they used for dis-
guise, and the signals they used to end their raids.93 Like Daly’s manual on
The Criminal Classes of Bengal, the knowledge contained in the report was
to be disseminated to police stations throughout the province. If it stopped
short of considering the revolutionaries to be hereditary criminals, it
nonetheless helped to establish the “bhadralok dacoit” as a new category
of colonial criminality.
This linkage between the activities of nineteenth-century groups such
as the thugs and twentieth-century political activists has been described by
Peter Robb as embodying “a British predilection for conspiracy theories”
based upon “a view of India as a mix of secretive cells to be penetrated and
kept in isolation from each other.”94 Indeed, the first police officers who
endeavored to understand the genesis and nature of the Bengali revolu-
tionary movement went back to the late-nineteenth-century Special
Branch archive in search of answers. While attempting in 1911 to under-
stand the connections between religious reform organizations such as the
Ram Krishna Mission, located outside of Calcutta, and the revolutionaries,
acting Deputy Inspector General F. C. Daly consulted the “old records”
of the Special Branch from the nineteenth century.95 Daly’s Note on the
Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal (1911), the first compre-
hensive imperial history of the revolutionary movement, drew attention to
a letter written to the Government of Bengal in 1895 titled “Disloyalty of
Members of the Arya Samaj.” The Arya Samaj was a prominent Hindu
reform organization founded in 1875 by Dayanand Saraswati, which
sought not only to restore a “purer” form of Hindu worship based on the
ancient texts known as the Vedas but also to protect Hinduism from the
threat of conversion to Islam, Christianity, and Sikhism.96 While the Arya
Samaj attracted the support of prominent nationalist leaders such as Lala
Lajpat Rai, Daly’s analysis focused not on contemporary nationalism but
on the Indian Rebellion. The letter, written by one Alaram Sanyasi, who
had previously provided secret information to the government, contended
that Dayanand Saraswati was strongly influenced by the 1857 rebel Nana
Rao Peshwa, who had accompanied him while he wandered as a sadhu fol-
lowing the suppression of the revolt. Dayanand’s goal was nothing less
than “the subversion of British power,” and the informant outlined the
dangers posed by his supporters, who numbered prominently among
nationalists, government servants, newspaper editors, and sepoys. Raising
46 M. SILVESTRI
the specter of a repeat of the Indian Rebellion, Sanyasi argued that “in the
native regiments of the British Army there are many soldiers professing the
principles of the Arya Samaj, and unless the military officers turn them
out, the whole army will become infected, and there will be a second
mutiny some day.”97
Daly clearly regarded this late-nineteenth-century intelligence as rele-
vant to the Intelligence Branch’s understanding of the revolutionaries’
relationship to social and religious reform movements. While acknowledg-
ing that it had been “practically absolved of mischievous revolutionary
connections,” he added that “I am personally inclined to regard the Arya
Samaj as more political than purely religious and a movement which
requires careful watching.”98 Daly was far from alone in his suspicions that
the Indian Rebellion might be a key to understanding early-twentieth-
century revolutionaries. In what Wagner has termed the “‘Mutiny’ motif,”
colonial officials dreaded a repeat of the Indian Rebellion well into the
twentieth century, as “their understanding of local movements and poli-
tics was overdetermined by the trauma of 1857.”99
The fear of a repeat of 1857, and its attendant rumors and conspiracies,
was revived with particular force in the early twentieth century. It coalesced
in 1907, the fiftieth anniversary of the rebellion and a year of significant
nationalist and revolutionary activity.100 These information panics of the
early twentieth century were enabled in part by new technology, such as
the falling cost of commercial telegraph rates, which enabled the greater
reporting of international news by the Indian press. (The Government of
India had lowered rates, and also dropped the cost of registering newspa-
pers as part of an effort “to ‘know the currents of unrest’ that were sus-
pected to flow beneath the surface of indigenous society.”) The subjects of
the panics were also described in an increasingly quasi-psychological and
medicalized fashion.101 But if they in some ways looked forward, these
information panics also revived fears akin to those of the mid-nineteenth
century, such as in referencing the circulation of the unleavened flatbreads
known as chapattis from village to village—a mysterious and threatening
phenomena the British had witnessed in 1857—in regions that had been
affected by the rebellion half a century earlier.102 Indeed, revolutionaries
played on British fears of Indian conspiracies with their language and cer-
emonies. The Bengal revolutionaries repeatedly used the phrase “sacrifice
of a white goat for Kali” as a way of advocating the murder of a European,
thus invoking both fears of the killings of British-Indians in 1857 and the
thugs’ alleged devotion to ritual murder in the name of the goddess Kali.103
The alleged role of religious mendicants in these imperial information

panics further linked colonial ideas of nineteenth-century collective Indian
criminality to twentieth-century revolutionaries. British concerns about
the threat posed by fakirs (religious mendicants), sadhus (holy men), and
sannyasis (mendicant monks) first arose during the campaign against thug-
gee in the 1830s. Holy men were included in the colonial mapping of the
Indian criminal underworld, which envisioned thugs operating as part of
a “pan-Indian conspiracy of hereditary criminals.”104 W. H. Sleeman con-
sidered that a “great part” of the “religious mendicants that infest all parts
of India were assassins by profession.”105 During the Indian Rebellion,
wandering holy men were believed to have to have provided the signals
that triggered and coordinated the revolt. As Bayly observes, “Thereafter,
wandering holy-men giving out benedictions were observed at every
major point of tension from 1858 until the end of British rule.” In 1907,
for example, police reports throughout India reported that “malevolent
holy-men” were smearing trees with cow-dung as prelude to a massacre of
Europeans that would bring the “Extremist” members of the Indian
National Congress to power.106
Colonial authorities in Bengal similarly believed that that sadhus and
sannyasis—or nationalists masquerading as these mendicant holy men—
were involved in the protests that followed the 1905 Partition of Bengal.
A Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam intelligence report observed
that “during the past year (1908) evidence has accumulated that the
number of sadhus and sanyasis wandering over the country is on the
increase, and that this increase is due to the fact that the agitators have
adopted this dress and guise to preach their boycott propaganda and as a
means of disseminating sedition.” The police officer who authored the
report noted that most of the “sadhus” were well-educated men who
spoke English rather than “genuine sadhus,” and he also noted with con-
cern that “Punjabi agitators” were using this tactic to communicate with
nationalists in eastern Bengal. Some of the reports were clearly fantasies
concocted by police officers or their informers, such as a story by “a
respectable and loyal Bengali gentleman” who reported that a sadhu had
told him “that he was one of 20 lakhs of sadhus all directed from Lahore,
whose sole object was to stir up the country, so that the British would be
turned out of India in five years.” Others were much more plausible: in
May 1908 two young Bengali men dressed as sannyasis planned to rob a
government treasury and supplied local revolutionaries with swords and
daggers that they had collected. Police superintendents were requested
48 M. SILVESTRI
“to keep a close watch over wandering sanyasis, particularly Punjabis or

English-speaking educated Bengalis.”107
The colonial knowledge that led to the conception of wandering holy
men as a threat to colonial order was constructed not simply by British
“experts,” but developed in conjunction with Indian informants and the
British-Indian and Indian publics.108 Indeed, Bengali revolutionaries made
a substantial contribution to the colonial linkage between wandering men-
dicants and “Indian terrorism.” One of the most venerated texts of the
revolutionaries, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s novel Anandamath (1882),
tells the story of Hindu sannyasis who rebel against the Muslim nawab of
Bengal and his East India Company allies in the late eighteenth century.
Hindu ascetic militarism was a complex historical phenomena, but in
Chatterjee’s literary imagination, Hindu ascetics were transformed into
“proto-modern Indian patriots, sprung from the soil to defend Hinduism
against Muslim and British invasions.”109 This view proved popular with a
later generation of Indian revolutionaries: the Dacca Anushilan Samiti, for
example, incorporated lines from the novel into one of its vows.110
Anandamath also contributed one of the great anthems of the nationalist
movement in Bengal, “Bande Mataram,” or “Hail, Motherland,” which
was later designated the “national song” of India.111 In the words of Tapan
Raychaudhuri, Anandamath became “the Bible of armed
revolutionaries.”112
Thus, influenced by both deep-seated colonial assumptions about
nineteenth-century criminality and the revolutionaries’ own veneration of
militant sannyasis and sadhus, colonial authorities in Bengal continued for
decades to link mendicant holy men with terrorism and nationalist protest.
While the Bengal Police IB officer Charles Tegart was on a mission in
1913 to interrogate revolutionaries who had been convicted and deported
to the Andaman Islands, he was struck by the prominence that they gave
to religious mendicants. After examining the papers of Upendra Nath
Banarji, one of the Manicktolla bomb conspirators, Tegart observed “it is
significant to find that the foremost place among the revolutionary legions
is accorded to the political Sadhu.” When the officer interviewed Banarji,
the revolutionary informed him that “there were many of them in India,
spreading the ‘idea.’”113 In the same year, Bengal Police Inspector General
R. B. Hughes-Buller developed “a huge comprehensive scheme for watch-
ing sadhus all over India by means of police officers who would disappear
for long periods.” The plan of surveillance seems to have been briefly put
into place, but DCI Charles Cleveland found it to be “hopelessly
impractical and the Provincial Governments found it so and gave it up.”

While Cleveland admitted that “we certainly know very little about the
part played by sadhus in rousing feeling against us,” in contrast to many
police officers in Bengal, he did not believe that this was a matter with
which Indian intelligence services should be concerning themselves:
I do not think the CID should be blamed for this want of knowledge. I do
not think sadhus organize societies. They think and preach and talk. They do
not, in my opinion, deserve an elaborate system of espionage which in their
case would be exceedingly costly, difficult, and dangerous. Our plan is to
watch the shores rather than the sea. If sadhus are going to get at the troops
we ought to hear from our agents and officers near the troops.114
Nonetheless, for over a decade the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch

maintained a voluminous file titled “Miscellaneous Enquiries regarding
Sadhus, Sannyasis and Fakirs” on the potential political implications of
Bengali sadhus traveling outside of the province and on holy men from
other parts of India who had come to Bengal. The IB, however, con-
cluded in almost all cases that the mendicants under surveillance were
“non-political,” or at worst engaged in “ordinary crime” such as swin-
dling money from devout Indians. In a few cases, however, the IB con-
cluded that they did indeed have connections to political movements. One
“suspicious” sadhu named Jugendra Chand Dutt, who was originally from
Faridpur District in eastern Bengal, made enquiries about the existence of
a bomb factory in Bilaspur in the Central Provinces. According to an intel-
ligence report, “He questioned several persons on the subject and led
them to believe he was a CID man, although he did not actually say this.”
Sarat Kumar Ghose of Barisal District, who was also known as Swami
Purushamananda Abadhut [sic], was reported to be a “staunch follower of
the Congress,” who had participated in the civil disobedience campaign in
the early 1930s and exhorted “students and other youths and females to
join the Congress.”115
As the above examples demonstrate, intelligence officers found the
world of religious mendicants to be difficult to penetrate, yet at the same
time worthy of police attention. The surveillance of sadhus and fakirs had
less to do with their practical involvement with revolutionary groups,
however, than with the place such mendicants occupied in the imperial
imagination. Intelligence officers often concluded that swamis and sadhus
by and large did not “mix themselves up in politics.”116 Nonetheless, the
50 M. SILVESTRI
legacy of the alleged involvement of religious mendicants with the activi-

ties of nineteenth-century thugs and the rebels of 1857 suggested to intel-
ligence officers that they might form a similar network for the spread of
revolutionary terror in twentieth-century Bengal.
5 “Criminal Tribes” and Bengal Revolutionaries

Fakirs and sadhus were far from the only peripatetic group whose activities
suggested to intelligence officers that some of the keys to combatting
“Bengali terrorism” lay in nineteenth-century assumptions about Indian
criminality. One of the most striking examples of the intersection between
colonial thinking about Indian criminality and police intelligence work
against the Bengal revolutionaries involved the application of legislation
directed toward the “criminal tribes.” Colonial authorities would seem, at
first glance, unlikely to make a sustained comparison between the Bengali
revolutionaries—largely bhadralok from the highest castes of Bengali
Hindu society—and the predominantly low-caste or aboriginal criminal
tribes. Yet the comparison recurred with surprising frequently in the early
years of the revolutionary movement.117
The detention of criminal tribes, as Aidan Forth has recently argued,
formed one of the precedents for the rise of the imperial concentration
camp in the early twentieth century.118 The criminal tribes were discussed
not only in terms of their “hereditary” criminal propensities but also in the
language of warfare and insurgency. Frederick Booth-Tucker of the
Salvation Army, which, in partnership with colonial authorities, ran settle-
ment camps in which tens of thousands of men, women, and children of
the criminal tribes were confined, described them as being in a “state of
war” rather than a “state of crime.” “They are soldiers more than rob-
bers,” he wrote. William Booth, the Salvation Army’s founder, described
their activities in a 1910 letter to Secretary of State for India John Morley
as “a kind of guerilla warfare” in which three to four million “hereditary
criminals” were ranged against the forces of the colonial state.119
Similarly, the Bengal revolutionaries were categorized as a type of sect,
who shared with the thugs a violent embrace of the Hindu goddess Kali.
Both the prominence of Hindu religious imagery and the dedication to
violence in the early revolutionary societies recalled features of colonial
constructions of thuggee. Members of early revolutionary groups in par-
ticular regarded themselves as young sannyasis, or mendicants, “who had
renounced family and career in the service of the nation symbolized by the
goddess Kali.”120 In the early years of the movement, revolutionaries typi-

cally took elaborate vows of initiation before images of the goddess.
Bengal Police officers, however, extended the comparison to criminal
tribes even further. They believed that even high-class and high-caste
Indians could in effect become hereditary criminals, citing instances where
“a particular form of crime is passed on from parents to children with such
regularity that it becomes practically an inheritance.”121 In the years prior
to and during the Great War, colonial authorities expressed concern about
not only the murders and dacoities carried out by revolutionaries but also
their tendency to “degenerate” and develop “criminal” behaviors. An
intelligence report noted how members of the “Howrah Gang,” an off-
shoot of Jugantar, had for years “showed the tendency, as occurred in
other cases, to degenerate into a band of ordinary criminals.”122 In 1917,
the Governor of Bengal contended that revolutionaries on the run from
the police had “degenerated” and were “driven to crime for their means
of existence, and are gradually approximating to a pure criminal type.”123
In response, the Government of Bengal considered the use against the
revolutionaries of legislation originally intended to control the criminal
tribes. In 1911, the Government of India had revised the Criminal Tribes
Act in order to make it easier for provincial governments to target “gangs”
for criminal purposes, rather than requiring that members of a group
defined as a “criminal tribe” be members of the same caste or tribe.124 The
result was an offensive against groups newly defined as criminal tribes,
such as an aboriginal people known as the Karwal Nats, who were said to
“generally follow the customs of very low class up-country Hindus.”125
More than 200 members of Karwal Nat “gangs” in North Bengal were
rounded up and confined to industrial settlements operated by the
Salvation Army in 1913.126
Colonial authorities in Bengal considered the revised Criminal Tribes
Act to be an appropriate and effective instrument to control “gangs” of
Bengali revolutionaries. In 1913, Inspector General R. B. Hughes-Buller
recommended that the act be extended further to revolutionary terrorists
in Bengal on the grounds that they were, in the language of the 1911
legislation, “addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable
offenses”:
Why, I venture to ask, should a criminal association, even though it pos-

sesses a “distinctively political character”, which is addicted to the habitual
commission of dacoity, murder and stealing, be exempted from the operation
52 M. SILVESTRI
of the Criminal Tribes Act simply because the members belong to the
Bengali bhadralog, or so-called gentleman class? The mere fact that the
organization is carried on as a “secret society” cannot surely be held to give
it a charmed life! All organizations for the commission of dacoity, whatever
the class of the members may be, are secret, and I can see no reason for
distinguishing bhadralog gentlemen, who are habitual dacoits, murderers
and thieves from, let us say, Muhammadans, who indulge in the same habit-
ual pastime.127
A prominent example of bhadralok who began as revolutionaries but came

to be regarded as “common criminals” was a group known as the “Bajitpur
gang” in the eastern Bengal district of Mymensingh. In 1908, a group
called the Bajitpur Society was formed that was closely allied with another
revolutionary society called the Sadhana Samaj. The Sadhana Samaj,
whose members initially consisted of students at the local National School,
was in turn allied with the Dacca Anushilan Samiti, one of the two main
Bengali revolutionary groups. When the Sadhana Samaj broke from the
local branch of the Anushilan Samiti, the members of the Bajitpur Society,
according to one British official, “seem to have commenced a sort of rov-
ing, independent career of crime.” By 1916, the Bajitpur gang numbered
seventy-six members known to the police, and was suspected of participat-
ing in nine dacoities and of murdering two former gang members who
had turned police informants. Many of the crimes of the Bajitpur gang
seemed to have no political implications, but its members also cooperated
with the members of the Dacca Anushilan Samiti in the commission of
dacoities in order to raise funds for revolutionary activity.128
Prior to the Great War, the Government of Bengal considered the use
of the 1911 Act to control a group of former revolutionaries believed to
have formed a criminal alliance. In December 1914, Hughes-Buller
requested permission to declare a group known as the “Narendra Nath
Sen’s gang” of Dacca to be a “criminal tribe,” and to compel all of the
members of the gang to register in their respective districts and notify their
District Magistrate of any change of address. The Bengal Police argued
that this would enable the police to keep better track of the movements of
gang members, and that the provisions of the Criminal Tribes Act were
applicable to these bhadralok because the gang members all belonged to
the “same sect” and were bound by “ethnological, geographical and reli-
gious” ties.129
Ultimately, the use of the Criminal Tribes Act against Narendra Nath
Sen’s gang was rendered unnecessary by wartime legislation that allowed
for detention without trial. By 1916, twenty-one of the thirty men identi-
fied as gang members had been convicted in criminal trials and sentenced
to jail terms ranging from one year to transportation for fifteen years. One
was held in a detention camp for revolutionaries in Burma, while seven
were detained under the wartime Defence of India Act. The Government
of Bengal noted that use of the Criminal Tribes Act would, however, “be
further considered in connection with any measures for the protection of
the community which may be required after the war, when the Special
Acts now in force will cease to operate.”130
6 The “Effeminate” yet “Fanatical” Bengali

Hindu
As the Government of Bengal’s debates about the application of the
Criminal Tribes Act to the new phenomena of “bhadralok dacoits” reveal,
colonial authorities’ attitudes to Bengali revolutionaries drew on a set of
sometimes contradictory colonial assumptions. On the one hand, Bengali
revolutionaries came from a group derided as “effeminate” and non-
military. On the other, these revolutionaries displayed a ruthlessness and
dedication in their actions, whether carrying out robberies or seeking to
assassinate colonial officials. The final section of this chapter will explore
how intelligence officers drew on nineteenth-century colonial stereotypes
and legislation in seeking to analyze and suppress the revolutionary activi-
ties of these “gentlemanly terrorists.”
As intelligence officers began to assemble their own extensive archive
on the “Bengali terrorists,” they frequently included details of the per-
sonal lives of revolutionaries. Such details, they argued, could shed light
on the relationships with fellow revolutionaries, and reflected what intel-
ligence officers considered to be their comprehensive knowledge of these
anticolonial organizations. Intelligence officers in particular displayed a
fascination with the sexuality of the revolutionaries. In the early revolu-
tionary samitis, in which young Bengali Hindu men lived together in an
ascetic environment characterized by a grueling daily routine, sexual rela-
tionships between some members seem to have been a not uncommon
occurrence.
54 M. SILVESTRI
Male-male sexual relations were frequently catalogued in intelligence

reports on the early samitis as examples of the “unnatural nature” of these
revolutionary groups. J. C. Nixon noted in a report on the Dacca Anushilan
Samiti that “moral perversion of the grossest kind is rife amongst the
members of this pernicious society … It would certainly not be fair to say
that pederasty was openly countenanced in the Samiti, but there are indi-
cations that in some cases it did not carry the stigma that the prominent
place given in their vows to purity of life, would lead one to expect.” One
of the first published reports on the Dacca Anushilan Samiti recounted
information from the diary of samiti member Sarat Chandra Chakravarty,
about two samiti members who were lovers. The information was possibly
intended as a report to samiti authorities against a breach of a vow taken
by members against “unnatural offenses.” Chakravarty wrote of two men
lying “huddled together,” their clothes partially removed at the waist.
“There was not much space between their ______. It would perhaps be
about the breadth of six fingers.”131
The revolutionary organizations sometimes punished such activities
harshly, with either physical punishment or death. In 1917, a revolution-
ary named Rebati Nag who had “misconducted himself” with a boy and
attempted to have “unnatural intercourse” with another revolutionary was
murdered in Berhampore. The samiti tried to arrange to have him killed
in front of two other revolutionaries who had similar charges against
them.132 Pulin Behari Das, the original leader of the Dacca Anushilan
Samiti and one of the most important of the early revolutionaries, was also
reputed to have had lovers among the youthful recruits to the samiti.
Nixon noted that Das caused a boy named Annada Prasad Ghose to be
murdered because of his knowledge of Das’ “criminal intimacy” with
samiti member Suresh Sen. “He was prepared was prepared to go to any
length to keep his name inviolate,” Nixon wrote, “for he knew nothing
could so enhance his personal influence as a belief that he had attained, in
some measure, to the state of the true Sannyasi who renounces all.” Other
early revolutionaries were more approving of sexual relationships between
samiti members, and believed that they might strengthen the revolution-
ary organizations. Amulya Sarkar, a member of the Jugantar Party associ-
ated with members of the Dacca Anushilan Samiti working in Calcutta,
approvingly quoted Socrates that “a most valiant army might be com-
posed of boys and their lovers.”133
British intelligence officers acknowledged that such relationships were
perhaps not unusual in revolutionary groups that removed large numbers
of young men and teenage boys from their families and housed them
together. Indeed, for some young Bengali Hindu men, revolutionary
samitis may have offered a way to escape from an expected early path to
marriage, as well as an opportunity for romantic and sexual relationships
with other young men. Early revolutionary terrorist leaders were well
aware of such temptations. ICS officer H. L. Salkeld noted the “great
significance in the prominence” given to the Dacca Anushilan Samiti’s
vow against “fornication, adultery and unnatural offenses.”134 Yet intelli-
gence officers’ analyses of revolutionaries’ sexual practices also repre-
sented, in their minds, an example of their comprehensive understanding
of the inner workings of the revolutionary organizations in the same way
that an earlier generation of colonial officials had laid bare the workings of
the “cult of the thugs.” While homosexuality was predominantly associ-
ated with the “virile” and “martial” races in the colonial imaginary, Bengali
“effeminacy” was a well-established concept by the beginning of the revo-
lutionary movement. Masturbation, thought to be a particular cause of
such effeminacy in the case of the Bengali Hindu male, was also closely
linked with homosexuality in late Victorian medico-social discourse.135
The history sheet of Debendra Kumar Ghosh, member of a revolution-
ary organization in eastern Bengal and sometime police informer who was
murdered in Comilla town in 1913, noted that he was “reported to be a
sodomist,” something that the Intelligence Branch believed may have
contributed to his death.136 This cataloguing of the personal lives of revo-
lutionaries demonstrated for intelligence officers both the degree to which
they believed that they had come to understand the inner workings of the
revolutionary organizations, and a key to further understanding the
actions of revolutionaries. In 1917, J. E. Armstrong, later DIG of the
Intelligence Branch, wrote that it was “exceedingly important” that “the
wide prevalence of the vice” among revolutionaries “should be more gen-
erally known by officers who have to deal with the revolutionary move-
ment in all its ramifications, for the knowledge may often serve to throw
light on situations otherwise inexplicable.”137
In addition to being characterized as effeminate—and at times homo-
sexual—revolutionaries were also pathologized in radically different ways.
While Bengali Hindus were emphatically excluded from the category of
“martial races,” colonial officials nonetheless drew upon methods used
against the “martial races” of India on the Northwest Frontier of India as
a means to suppress revolutionaries who were seen to share the “fanatical”
quality of Muslim insurgents on the Indian frontier. More specifically,
56 M. SILVESTRI
colonial authorities discussed on multiple occasions the application of the

Murderous Outrages Act of 1867 to the revolutionaries. The Murderous
Outrages Act (MOA) epitomized the colonial tendency toward draconian
legislation which was couched in the language of the rule of law. Applied
to the Northwest Frontier of India, the Act gave colonial officials consid-
erable scope to prosecute individuals identified as “fanatics” for crimes of
murder or attempted murder of a European or anyone employed by a
European. Those convicted were almost always executed, and their sen-
tences were carried out rapidly, sometimes on the same day.138 As Mark
Condos has argued, the Murderous Outrages Act was not an exception to
British efforts to codify and apply the rule of law in post-1857 India.
Rather, the legislation—one of the most draconian ever passed in colonial
India—“drew upon and enabled a much more pervasive and widespread
legal-political culture in British India: one which sought to maintain ‘illim-
itable’ forms of sovereignty and executive authority, but under the aus-
pices of a ‘universal’ rule of law.”139
Intelligence officers frequently referred to Bengali revolutionaries as
“fanatics,” the same language applied to the “savage” insurgents of the
Northwest Frontier. Intelligence Branch Superintendent R. E. A. Ray
described revolutionary “absconders” fleeing arrest as “murderous fanat-
ics whose fanaticism increases after every outrage,” who “infect other ter-
rorists and potential terrorists with their own fanaticism.”140 Indeed, the
MOA was considered as a potential measure to be deployed against the
revolutionaries in the early years of the movement. In 1908, the Governor
of Eastern Bengal and Assam, noting that the revolutionaries had made six
efforts to assassinate colonial officials in the previous year, including the
Governor of Bengal and the Mayor of Chandernagore, argued that the
MOA was one of the resources available to colonial authorities to stop
revolutionary terrorism, including ordinances passed during the Indian
Rebellion of 1857 and during the campaign against thuggee. “I cannot
help thinking,” he wrote, “that there is much to be said in favour of an
enactment like the Frontier Murderous Outrages Act.” If the legislation
was deemed “too drastic” to apply in its entirety, he suggested that some
of its provisions might be adopted.141
More sustained discussions of the potential applicability of the MOA
took place during the late 1920s and early 1930s as the revolutionary
campaign in Bengal and north India intensified. In 1929, the Director of
the Intelligence Bureau, David Petrie, concluded that the potential for
revolutionary violence presented a “far more dangerous” situation than
that faced by any previous government. Petrie stressed that he was not
being a “scaremonger,” but feared that an upsurge in revolutionary vio-
lence would render the careful intelligence-gathering of the Bengal Police
IB and other provincial special branches useless:
If violence again becomes in any way general and finds the right kind of
advertisement in successful outrages, then it is certain that recruits will be
obtainable in almost indefinite numbers. Police suspect lists and registers
which, in the past, have proved a fairly useful tally, will no longer be even an
index, let alone a complete record. The guiding lines presented by well-
known suspects and their doings will tend to be completely effaced … I am
convinced that the successful adoption of violence on any extensive scale
would bring in many besides the well-known revolutionaries and the rabid
young men who would naturally be found in the front ranks.
Violence, he concluded, “must be at all costs repressed.”142 Petrie sug-

gested that the MOA might serve as a model. “This may appear to be an
extreme step,” he wrote, “but it may be one that circumstances may leave
us no choice but to adopt.”143
One of the most vigorous advocate of bringing methods utilized on the
Northwest Frontier to bear on Indian revolutionaries was Brigadier E. D.
Giles, the Director of Military Operations, who observed in 1930 that
“across our Northwestern border, the tribesmen, who have been giving
trouble purely as a result of Congress activity, are subject, after warning,
to the ruthless bombing of their villages and herds.” He went on to ask,
“Are these Bengali terrorists with their fringe of Congress supporters to
be regarded as any less as enemies?” While it was “impossible to punish
them in the same indiscriminate manner” as on the Northwest Frontier,
he contended that there was a need for a similar legal and disciplinary regi-
men as the Murderous Outrages Act provided.144
Giles’ solution was immediate and public flogging of those the police
arrested or detained for terrorist activity, arguing that “some form of
immediate and summary punishment is essential.” Those found by police
in possession of a revolver or a bomb, he argued, “should be severely
flogged as a matter of course” prior to trial. Invoking colonial stereotypes
of Bengali Hindus as cowardly, Giles contended that such punishment is
what terrorist suspects would “definitely fear.” Emphasizing again the
need that the punishment be “severe,” Giles argued that the whipping
should be carried out exclusively with a cat o’ nine tails, since “the cane is
58 M. SILVESTRI
too mild a weapon.”145 Legislation based on the MOA was also considered
following a series of revolutionary “outrages,” including an attempt on
the life of the President of the European Association in Calcutta, in late
1931, and following delays in the execution of Surjya Sen, the leader of
the Chittagong Armoury Raid. The head of the Intelligence Branch
argued that no distinction should be drawn between “political” and “reli-
gious” fanatics.146
Although the Murderous Outrages Act was ultimately not applied to
Bengal, the repeated discussion of the relevance of this nineteenth-century
legislation to the activities of the “Bengali terrorists” illustrates how the
practices of policing and the colonial legislation passed against what were
perceived as various forms of Indian “criminality” in the nineteenth cen-
tury were carried forward into the final decades of colonial rule.
* * *
The ideology, organization, and tactics of the Bengali revolutionaries

posed new challenges for the British Raj in the twentieth century. British
officials recognized how the revolutionaries’ secret cells, political assassi-
nations, and plans for insurrection comprised novel modes of anticolonial
resistance in colonial India. Indeed, the revolutionaries of the Anushilan
Samiti, Jugantar, and other revolutionary groups represented for many
British observers the importation of European revolutionary methods—
and in particular the “bomb and pistol cult” of anarchism—to colonial
India. In 1910, the Viceroy, Lord Minto, described the Bengal revolution-
aries to the Prince of Wales as a foreign importation, “largely directed
from Paris and London,” and “much the same as the anarchists of
European countries.”147
Yet at the same time, as this chapter has argued, colonial anxieties led to
the establishment of new intelligence systems and informed intelligence
officers’ analyses of the revolutionary groups. Colonial officials under-
stood the new threat of Bengali “anarchism” within the context of colo-
nial attitudes to Indian collective criminality and secret societies which had
developed over the previous century. In this formulation, the murderous,
religiously inspired, conspiratorial secret societies of the revolutionaries
represented a new variant on earlier manifestations of Indian criminality,
not an entirely new phenomena. In a similar fashion, the institutions that
developed to police the revolutionaries—the Bengal Police Intelligence
Branch and the Department of Criminal Intelligence of the Government
of India—bore a similar debt to earlier institutions—the Special Branch

and the Thagi & Dakaiti Department—devoted to the suppression of
what were regarded as distinctively Indian forms of collective criminality.
The views of police officers and other officials involved with intelligence
work against the revolutionaries were similarly rooted in their training and
experience regarding colonial Indian society and its ostensibly distinctive
culture of criminality. The Bengal Police’s attempted use of the Criminal
Tribes Act to detain revolutionaries, the surveillance of sadhus to discover
their relationship to secret revolutionary cells and the combing of
nineteenth-century Special Branch records in search of insights into revo-
lutionary behavior all demonstrate how colonial officials sought to use
existing legislation and existing modes of colonial categorization regard-
ing collective criminality to respond to the threat posed by
revolutionaries.
Underlying this recourse to nineteenth-century conceptions of Indian
unrest and criminality were recurrent fears of a revival of the Indian
Rebellion of 1857 and a persistent sense of unease among colonial officials
regarding their lack of knowledge of the Indian social and political world.
Fears of revolutionary conspiracy assumed a prominent place in colonial
knowledge panics during the first decade of the twentieth century. Even as
colonial officials began to compile the beginnings of a voluminous colo-
nial archive on the Bengali revolutionaries, these comparisons to
nineteenth-century Indian criminal activity reflected deep-rooted colonial
perceptions regarding the nature of Indian society and in particular Indian
criminality. Thus, it did not appear incongruous to colonial officials that
elite, often-Western-educated revolutionaries could be compared to thugs
and criminal tribes.
To be sure, this recourse to the practices of nineteenth-century colo-
nialism was not by any means the only way in which authorities sought to
understand and formulate policies to suppress the revolutionaries.
Nonetheless, these analogies between nineteenth-century Indian criminal-
ity and twentieth-century Indian revolutionaries did not disappear entirely
over the three-decade long history of the revolutionary movement in
Bengal. The colonial attitudes discussed in this chapter remained promi-
nent in the discussion and promulgation of legislation aimed at suppress-
ing “Bengali terrorism.” Some intelligence officers continued to be
involved in the policing of what were regarded as distinctively Indian
forms of collective criminality. Charles Tegart, who served as Police
Commissioner of Calcutta from 1923 to 1931 and was regarded as the
60 M. SILVESTRI
foremost expert on “Indian terrorism,” was also involved in the policing

of gangs of urban criminals known as “goondas.” “Goondas” replaced
thugs, poisoners, and criminal tribes as the preeminent source of anxiety
regarding Indian criminality in twentieth-century Bengal, and “goonda-
ism” became a pejorative label applied to the actions of Bengali revolu-
tionaries.148 This effort to delegitimize the revolutionaries in Bengal by
referring to them as “goondas” or “criminal elements” was only one of the
first instances of a broader phenomena in which anticolonial insurgents,
whether nationalist or communist in orientation, were labeled not only
“terrorists” but also “gangsters” and “thugs.”149
Finally, legislation designed to deal with collective Indian criminality
continued to be a resource for officials seeking to suppress “terrorist”
activity in Bengal. The Goondas Act of 1923, which allowed the
Government of Bengal to extern those designated as goondas, was later
adapted for use against arms smugglers in the province in an effort to
staunch the flow of arms to revolutionaries.150
The linkage of twentieth-century anticolonial revolutionaries with
nineteenth-century thugs, dacoits, “fanatics,” and criminal tribes repre-
sented a pronounced and enduring colonial mode of understanding the
new phenomena of anticolonial terrorism. The following chapter will
explore how the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch attempted to collect
and analyze information about the “bhadralok dacoits.”

London
CS Chief Secretary
University
IO India Office
London
Pol Political
Sec. Secretary
Bengal, 1995)
Notes
1. Moki Singh, Mysterious India (London: Stanley Paul, 1938). Alex Tickell
notes that the records of Stanley Paul are no longer extant. Alex Tickell,
“Scholarship Terrorists: The India House Hostel and the ‘Student
Problem’ in Edwardian London,” in Rehana Ahmed and Sumita
Mukherjee, eds., South Asian Resistances in Britain 1858–1947 (London:
Continuum, 2012), 4. Secretary of State for India Samuel Hoare referred
to Rao as “a clever and thoroughly unscrupulous Indian employed to
their shame by the ‘Morning Post.’” Samuel Hoare to John Anderson,
Governor of Bengal, 23 February. 1934, Templewood Collection, MSS
Eur. E 240/9, APAC BL.
2. Singh, Mysterious India, 44, 225 and 232.
3. Edmund Candler, Siri Ram Revolutionist: A Transcript from Life, 1907–
1910 (London, Bombay and Sydney, 1912), 16–17.
4. George Macmunn, Black Velvet: A Drama of India and the Bomb Cult
(London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1934), 25 and 96.
5. Prem Chowdhury, Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema:
Image, Ideology and Identity (Manchester and New York: Manchester
6. Sedition Committee Report (1918; Reprint Calcutta and New Delhi: New
Age, 1973), 25; Earl of Ronaldshay, The Heart of Aryavarta: A Study of
62 M. SILVESTRI
the Psychology of the Indian Unrest (London: Constable, 1925), 79 and

80; Charles Tegart, “Terrorism in India,” (1932) in TIB III: xxxvi.
7. Tegart, “Terrorism in India,” in TIB III: xlvii and xxxviii.
8. Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial
State in India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017), 1, 6–7.
9. Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Indian Nationalism and the ‘World Forces’:
Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions of the Indian Freedom
Movement on the Eve of the First World War,” Journal of Global History
2: 3 (2007), 325–344.
10. F. Roddis, Sadhus and Sannyasis in Eastern Bengal and Assam: Their
Connection with Political Agitation (1909). I am grateful to Dr. Amiya
K. Samanta, former Director of the West Bengal Police Intelligence
Branch, for providing me with a copy of this report. The concerns of the
Bengal Police Intelligence Branch with sadhus and sannyasis are discussed
in more detail in Sect. 4 of the chapter.
11. Kim A. Wagner, “‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’ Motif and
Colonial Anxieties in British India,” Past and Present No. 218 (2013),
186. The Eastern Bengal and Assam Police believed that the large num-
bers of sadhus observed around the province were mainly “due to the fact
that agitators have adopted this dress and guise … as a means of dissemi-
nating sedition,” but noted that “genuine sadhus” were employed by
nationalists in Northern India, and that Punjabi nationalists used sadhus
to communicate with their counterparts in Bengal. Roddis, Sadhus and
Sannyasis, 1.
12. Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the
Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), xv–xxiv.
13. Colonel Sir Arthur Bigge to Lord Minto, 8 February 1910, MS 12740,
Minto Papers, National Library of Scotland [NLS].
14. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social
Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996). For imperial anxieties in this era of technological and politi-
cal change in India, see also Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, Telegraphic
Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c. 1830–1920
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), esp. 179–208.
15. This approach also serves to de-romanticize imperial intelligence, and “by
so doing calls into question some of the most sacred tropes for discussing
European activities in Asia (e.g. savage warfare, civilizing missions, devel-
opment).” James Hevia, The Imperial Security State: British Colonial
Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge
16. Two of the most prominent Bengal Police intelligence officers, Godfrey
Denham and Charles Tegart, both were stationed initially in the city of
Patna, now in Bihar, at the beginning of the twentieth century, where one
of their important responsibilities was applying anti-plague measures.
Tegart memoir, 38–41.
17. F. C. Daly, “Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in
Bengal,” (1911) in TIB I: 1–216; and Manual of Criminal Classes
Operating in Bengal (1916), V/27/160/8, APAC, BL.
18. For example, Daly devoted attention to explaining the origins and eth-
nography of different “criminal tribes,” explaining how the origins of a
people known as the Byadhs of lower Bengal were “obscure” and how
another “criminal tribe” known as the Lodhas were classed by H. H.
Risley as a branch of the Bhumji, an aboriginal tribe inhabiting jungle
tracts in western Midnapore district of Bengal. Daly, Criminal Classes,
preface, 6 and 19.
19. Kim A. Wagner, “‘Calculated to Strike Terror’: The Amritsar Massacre
and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence,” Past and Present No. 233
(2016), 185–225 (quotation on 206).
20. Curzon Wylie was not simply a random British target, however; in his role
at the India Office he was tasked with gathering information about the
nationalist activities of Indians at India House, a center of anticolonial
political activities for Indian students in London. Daniel Brückenhaus,
Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance
of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2017), 16.
21. Important recent works on Ghadar include Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia:
How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to
Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley and London: University of
California Press, 2011); Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance
and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014); and Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in
Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global
Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Kama
Maclean’s A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image,
Voice and Text (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) is
an important analysis of the popularity of Indian revolutionaries and their
relationship to the Indian National Congress.
22. Cited in Neeti Nair, “Bhagat Singh as ‘Satyagrahi’: The Limits to Non-
violence in Late Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 43: 3 (2009),
649–681 (quotation on 669).
23. For the history of the revolutionary movement in Bengal, see in particu-
lar Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, and Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal:
64 M. SILVESTRI
The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India 1900–1910 (Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1993).
24. H. W. Hale, Terrorism in India, 1917–1936 (1937; Reprint Delhi: Deep
Publications, 1974), 5; and “Terrorism in India. A Summary of Activities
up to March, 1933,” 11 May 1933, WO 106/5445, NA UK.
25. The partition also created a third province, Bihar and Orissa, which had
been part of the pre-1905 Bengal Presidency. The province of Eastern
Bengal and Assam was dissolved in 1911, reuniting Bengal. For Lord
Curzon’s role, see David Gilmour, Curzon (London: John Murray,
1994), 271–273.
26. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–08 (New Delhi:
People’s Publishing House, 1973).
27. Steven G. Marks, “‘Bravo, Brave Tiger of the East!’ The Russo-Japanese
War and the Rise of Nationalism in British Egypt and India,” in John
Steinberg et al, eds., The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective (Boston
and Leiden: Brill, 2005), 609–627. For the impact of the Japanese vic-
tory in the Russo-Japanese War across Asia, see Pankaj Mishra, From the
Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia
(London: Picador, 2013).
28. Sedition Committee Report, 17.
29. “Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal, Eastern
Bengal and Assam, and United Bengal,” (1914) in TIB I: 224.
30. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in
Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), ix.
31. In Rajat Kanta Ray’s words, a “sub-imperialism” of Bengali officials in
courts and various government offices followed British imperial expan-
sion across northern India in the nineteenth century. Rajat Kanta Ray,
Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal 1875–1927 (Delhi: Oxford
32. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the
‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York and
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
33. Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the
Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1998), 24; and Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta, “The Effeminate and the
Masculine: Nationalism and the Concept of Race in Colonial Bengal,” in
Peter Robb, ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford
34. Heehs, Bomb in Bengal, 29–31.
35. Heehs, Bomb in Bengal, 31.
36. “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal 1905–1933,”
(1933) in TIB I: 795–797; and Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, 474.
37. “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal 1905–1933,” in

TIB I: 796 and 799.
38. Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia, 111–141.
39. “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal, 1905–1933,” in
TIB I: 800.
TIB I: 808.
41. Leonard A. Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement 1876–1940 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 149. For the organization of
Bengali revolutionary cells, known as dals, around a dada, or leader, see
Gordon, Bengal, 142–148.
42. Manini Chatterjee, Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930–34 (Delhi:
Penguin, 1999). The Auxiliary Force was a part-time, volunteer force
within the Indian Army consisting of Europeans and Eurasians.
43. Intelligence work following the Chittagong Armoury Raid will be dis-
cussed in Chap. 4.
44. Hiren Chakrabarti, Political Protest in Bengal: Boycott and Terrorism
1905–1918 (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1992), 171. David M. Laushey estimates
that the total number of active Bengali revolutionaries at any one time
numbered no more than three thousand. David M. Laushey, Bengal
Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of Regional Nationalism in India,
1905–1942 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1975), 135.
45. “Report on the Work of the Central and District Intelligence Branches
for the Three Years 1930, 1931 and 1932,” L/P&J/12/466, APAC BL.
the Central and District Intelligence Branches of the Bengal Police (1936),
10. L/S&G/7/291, APAC BL.
47. For the popular appeal of Bhagat Singh and the Hindustan Socialist
Republican Association and their impact on nationalist politics, see
Maclean, Revolutionary History.
48. Isan Chandra Mahapatra, Boy Revolutionary of India: Khudiram Basu
(Calcutta: Orient Book Company, 1947), np; and Extract from Weekly
Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, GOI,
14 April 1932, L/P&J/12/391, APAC BL. Mahapatra noted that his
biography was first published on “Khudiram Day, 11th August 1947.”
49. Shukla Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda and Political
Culture in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1.
50. Extract from Weekly Report of Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home
Department, GOI, 26 November 1924, L/P&J/12/220, APAC BL. In
1923 the GOB observed that “a noteworthy feature in year under review
was the large amount of writing in frank praise of old revolutionaries.”
66 M. SILVESTRI
“Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal, 1905–1933,” in

TIB I: 804.
TIB I: 803–804.
52. Bayly, Empire and Information; and Hevia, Imperial Security State.
53. For a similar argument regarding British and French Empires in the
Middle East, see Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services
and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 2008), 224.
54. Bayly, Empire and Information, 365.
55. Bayly, Empire and Information, 143; and Wagner, “‘Treading Upon
Fires,’” 159–197.
56. Cited in Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early
Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 228.
57. B. N. Mullik, the Director of the Intelligence Bureau from 1950 to 1964,
contended that “the suppression of the Thugs, the Pindaris and the
Badhak dacoits by the predecessor of the Intelligence Bureau in the sec-
ond quarter of the nineteenth century … undoubtedly has been the
greatest achievement in police history.” B. N. Mullik, World’s Great
Policemen (New Delhi: Kalyani Publishers, 1978), ix.
58. Kim A. Wagner, “‘In Unrestrained Conversation’: Approvers and the
Colonial Ethnography of Crime in Nineteenth-century India,” in Kim
A. Wagner and Ricardo Rocque, eds., Engaging Colonial Knowledge:
Reading European Archives in World History (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 135.
59. Cases of poisoning, a major source of panics among the British-Indian
community in the late nineteenth century, involved the use of seeds from
the common datura plant. Sleeman’s successor as head of the Thagi &
Dakaiti Department, Colonel Charles Hervey, referred to “datura thug-
gee.” David Arnold, “The Poison Panics of British India,” in Fischer-
Tiné, ed., Anxieties, Fear and Panic, 57–59.
60. Lord Curzon to St. John Brodrick, 11 August 1904, L/P&J/6/670,
APAC BL.
61. Lord Curzon to St. John Brodrick, 11 August 1904, L/P&J/6/670,
APAC BL.
62. Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British
Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924 (London:
Frank Cass, 1995), 14 and 22.
63. Cited in Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 22.
64. Richard Popplewell calls the Duleep Singh conspiracy “the most serious
danger the British perceived within India in the later nineteenth century.”
Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 24–25. Duleep Singh’s
alliances with the Russian Empire and Irish revolutionaries are detailed in
Christy Campbell, The Maharajah’s Box: An Imperial Story of Conspiracy,
Love and a Guru’s Prophecy (London: HarperCollins, 2000).
65. Thuggee and Dacoity Department. Special Branch, Abstract of Intelligence,
Week Ending 13 October 1888, I: 28, p. 493. D/1071/H/M/11/2,
Dufferin Collection, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland [PRONI].
66. Thuggee and Dacoity Department. Special Branch, Abstract of Intelligence,
Week Ending 21 April 1888, I: 3. D/1071/H/M/11/2, Dufferin
Collection, PRONI.
67. C. A. Bayly observes that “By the 1830s all criminals were assigned to
‘castes’ whereas in the day-books of the pre-colonial ‘police’ a flexible
grid of attribution of caste, occupation, or affiliation to nobles had been
used.” Bayly, Empire and Information, 372.
68. Sanjay Nigam, “Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth’, Part
1: The Making of a Colonial Stereotype – The Criminal Tribes and Castes
of North India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 27: 2
(1990), 131–164; Nigam, “Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by
Birth’, Part 2: The Development of a Disciplinary System, 1871–1900,”
Indian Economic and Social History Review 27: 3 (1990), 257–287; and
Meena Radhakrishna, Dishonoured By History: ‘Criminal Tribes’ and
British Colonial Policy (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001).
69. For the parallels between thugs and criminal tribes in the discussions sur-
rounding the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act see Nigam, “The Making of a
Colonial Stereotype,” 134–136. See also Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee:
Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-century India (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 225; and Sandria B. Freitag, “Crime in the
Social Order of Colonial North India,” Modern Asian Studies 25: 2
(1991), 244. As Aidan Forth notes the Criminal Tribes Act also “adapted
Britain’s Habitual Criminals Act (1869) and its workhouse infrastructure
to a colonial context.” Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s
Empire of Camps, 1876–1903 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2017), 34.
70. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 42–56.
71. Indian Police historian Percival Griffiths argued that the Thagi & Dakaiti
Department “served India well, not only in controlling thuggee and poi-
soning and reducing the incidence of dacoity, but also in establishing
sound principles of criminal investigation and thus helping to lay the
foundations of the modern police force.” Percival Griffiths, To Guard My
People: A History of the Indian Police (London: Ernest Benn, 1971), 121
and 136.
72. Circular No. 5 of 30 December 1887 from J. C. Veasey for all District
Superintendents of Police, R/1/1/97, APAC BL.
68 M. SILVESTRI
73. J. Ware Edgar to Sir Stuart Bayley, 25 February 1888, R/1/1/97, APAC
BL.
74. SB Circular No. 1, 9 March 1901, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 32 of
1901, WBSA.
75. SB Circular No. 1, 9 March 1901, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 32 of
1901, WBSA.
76. A. E. Stevens, Asst. IG, to CS to GOB, nd [1901], GOB Home (Pol)
Conf. No. 32 of 1901, WBSA.
77. From 1888 to 1900, the Special Branch Abstract increased from 1322 to
3195 paragraphs, its letters received from 104 to 429 and its letters issued
from 578 to 814. W. R. Bright, IG, to CS to GOB, 28 May 1901, GOB
Home (Pol) Conf. No. 33 of 1901, WBSA.
78. W. R. Bright, IG, to CS to GOB, 28 May 1901, GOB Home (Pol) Conf.
No. 33 of 1901, WBSA.
80. F. C. Daly, “Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in
Bengal,” (1911) in TIB I: 11–12.
81. The Bengal CID was composed of 39 officers and 31 men, while the
Calcutta CID consisted of 13 officers and 48 men. From 1904 until the
formation of the CID in 1906, the investigation of organized and profes-
sional crime in Bengal was under the control of the Special Branch.
Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 102 and 117; and L. F.
Morshead, Officiating IG to CS to GOB, 12 January 1909, GOB Home
(Pol) Conf. No. 83 of 1909, WBSA.
82. Note by J. R. B., 5 May 1909, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 16 of 1909,
WBSA.
83. L. F. Morshead, Officiating IG to CS to GOB, 12 January 1909, GOB
Home (Pol) Conf. No. 83 of 1909, WBSA; and Popplewell, Intelligence
and Imperial Defence, 114.
84. In practice, from an early date an officer designated the Crime Assistant
supervised the work of the CID. S. G. Taylor, “The Bengal C.I.D. and
I.B,” Indian Police Collection, MSS Eur. F 161/210, APAC BL.
MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 117–122; and Keith Jeffery, MI6: The
History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury,
2010), 245–248.
86. For the mischaracterization of the Bengali revolutionary movement as
“anarchists,” see Richard Bach Jensen, “The International Campaign
against Anarchist Terrorism, 1880–1930s,” Terrorism and Political
Violence, 21: 1 (2009), 90 and 107.
87. Sandria Freitag observes that the use of approvers was “the central strat-
egy in Sleeman’s arsenal.” Sandria B. Freitag, “Crime in the Social Order
of Colonial North India,” Modern Asian Studies, 25: 2 (1991), 229.
88. For issues in interpreting the testimony of thug approvers, see Wagner,
Thuggee, 15–18.
89. Shahid Amim, “Approver’s Testimony, Judicial Discourse: The Case of
Chauri Chaura,” in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies V (Delhi: Oxford
90. Griffiths, To Guard My People, 236.
91. R. E. A. Ray, Notes on draft of To Guard My People, Chap. 22, p. 13,
Indian Police Collection, MSS Eur. F 161/257, APAC BL. Griffiths
nonetheless included the reference to the Thagi & Dakaiti Department in
the final version of the book.
92. R. H. Sneyd-Hutchinson, “Memorandum by the Intelligence Branch on
the Modus Operandi Followed in Political Dakaitis,” (1913) in TIB III:
913–927. The classic example of the thuggee archive is W. H. Sleeman’s
Ramaseeana (1836), the major source of information about the thugs,
and in which Sleeman famously boasted, “I am satisfied that there is no
term, no rite, no ceremony, no omen or usage that they have intentionally
concealed from me.” See the excerpts in Kim A. Wagner, ed., Stranglers
and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 190–205.
93. “Modus Operandi Followed in Political Dakaitis,” in TIB III: 923–924.
94. Peter Robb, “The Ordering of Rural India: The Policing of Nineteenth-
century Bengal and Bihar,” in David M. Anderson and David Killingray,
eds., Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control 1830–1940
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 137.
95. The Intelligence Branch later compiled a report on the Ram Krishna
Mission and its connections to nationalist political activity. C. A. Tegart,
“A Note on the Ramkrishna Mission,” (1914) in TIB IV: 1333–1375.
96. In pursuit of these goals, the Arya Samaj rejected caste distinctions and
advocated conversion and re-conversion to Hinduism.
97. “Translation of a letter addressed by Alaram Sanyasi, of Allahabad, to the
Bengal Government,” appendix to “Note on the Growth of the
Revolutionary Movement in Bengal,” (1911) in TIB I: 53 and 56.
98. “Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal,”
(1911) in TIB I: 19.
99. Wagner, “‘Treading Upon Fires,’” 160 and 193.
100. Commemorations of 1857 during the Delhi Durbar of 1902 celebrating
the coronation of King Edward VII at a time of famine and plague out-
70 M. SILVESTRI
break helped to spark rumors of a repeat of the revival in both Indian and
British-Indian media. This outbreak was feared to take place on the 50th
anniversary of the “Mutiny.” As D. K. Lahiri Choudhury writes,
“Astrologers, revolutionaries and government officials were now working
on a common schedule in anticipation of an uprising around 1907–8.”
D. K. Lahiri Choudhury, “Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: the
Imagined State’s Entanglement with Information Panic, India c. 1880–
1912,” Modern Asian Studies 38: 4 (2004), 965–1002 (quotation on
978).
101. Lahiri Choudhury, “Sinews of Panic,” 975–981.
102. Indians regarded the circulation of chapattis in 1857 as a sign that the
East India Company would compel them to betray their religious beliefs
by eating the same food as Christians. In turn, this was to compel them
to convert to Christianity. Wagner, “‘Treading Upon Fires,’” 168.
103. Wagner, Great Fear of 1857, xv–xxiv.
104. Wagner, Thuggee, 126. As Wagner and C. A. Bayly note, there existed an
itinerant underworld in nineteenth-century India of wandering peoples,
including mendicants, “that sometimes engaged in various crimes includ-
ing thuggee and whom the thugs recognized as part of their larger net-
work,” “a ‘counter society of robbers, mendicants and wandering
people.” This “itinerant underground” did not, however, have the coher-
ence and uniformity that British officials of the Thagi & Dakaiti
Department ascribed to it. Wagner, Thuggee, 126 (emphasis in original);
and C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in
the Age of British Expansion (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
318.
105. Cited in Wagner, Thuggee, 121. Sleeman elsewhere contended that Indian
monastic orders were composed chiefly “of persons floating loosely upon
society, without property or character, with the object of acquiring the
property of others.” Cited in Singha, A Depotism of Law, 187.
106. Bayly, Empire and Information, 316.
107. Sadhus and Sannyasis in Eastern Bengal and Assam (1909), 1–2.
108. Wagner, “‘Treading Upon Fires,’” 161–162.
109. Hindu ascetics served the Mughal Empire as well as the forces of the East
India Company, while rival sects of Hindu ascetics (devotees of Shiva and
Vishnu) fought each other. William R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian
Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9; and “Soldier
Monks and Militant Sadhus,” in David Ludden, ed., Contesting the
Nation: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India
(Philadelphia, 1990), 140–162.
110. H. L. Salkeld, “Anushilan Samiti Dacca. Part I,” (1909) in TIB II: 40–41.
111. Anandamath has also been the subject of considerable debate due to its
negative portrayals of Muslims and its “tendency to homogenize both
Hindus and Muslims into opposing camps.” See the introduction to
Julius J. Lipner, ed., and trans., Bankimcandra Chatterji, Anandamath, or
the Sacred Brotherhood (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), 61–104 (quotation on 103).
112. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 134.
113. Charles Tegart, Note on the Andaman Enquiries (1913), 21 and 28; GOB
114. Cleveland also noted that the Criminal Investigation Department for-
merly had a “genuine sadhu” in its pay, but added that “he never sent us
anything of any use whatever.” Note by C. R. Cleveland, DCI, 13 July
1914, GOI Home (Pol) Deposit No. 34 of July, 1914, NAI.
115. Extract from the Weekly Confidential Diary of District SP., Bilaspur, 1
August 1931; and SP, Barisal, to SP, Nadia, 1 September 1937; GOB IB
No. 18 of 1926, WBSA.
116. C. A. Tegart, “A Note on the Ramkrishna Mission,” (1914) in TIB IV:
1370.
117. Here my interpretation of the relationship between “bhadralok dacoits”
and “criminal tribes” in the imperial imaginary diverges from that of
Durba Ghosh. Although Ghosh notes the distinction that the Government
of Bengal ultimately drew between “bhadralok dacoits” and “criminal
tribes,” I would suggest that for colonial officials the lines between the
revolutionaries’ “criminal associations” and the peoples labeled criminal
tribes and criminal castes were not always so clear-cut. Ghosh, Gentlemanly
Terrorists, 7–8.
118. For the operation of the camps, which employed labor by members of the
“criminal tribes” as both a punishment and a civilizing force, see Forth,
Barbed-Wire Imperialism, 34–41.
119. Francis Booth-Tucker, Crimocurology: The Indian Crim and What to Do
With Him (4th ed, Simla: 1916), 9–10; and William Booth, Salvation
Army, London, to John Morley, Secretary of State for India, 2 August
1910, File No. 2740, L/P&J/6/1022, APAC BL.
120. Barbara Southard, “The Political Strategy of Aurobindo Ghose: The
Utilization of Hindu Religious Symbolism and the Problem of Political
Mobilization in Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 14: 3 (1980), 369.
121. F. C. Daly, “Some Types of the Indian Hereditary Criminal,” The Police
Journal: A Quarterly Review for the Police Forces of the Empire 1: 1 (1928),
105–117 (quotation on 114).
122. J. C. Nixon, “An Account of the Revolutionary Organizations in Bengal
other than the Dacca Anushilan Samiti,” (1917) in TIB II: 539.
72 M. SILVESTRI
123. “My Bengal Diary,” 4 October 1918, Zetland Collection, MSS Eur. D
609/1, APAC BL.
124. As Sandria Freitag has observed, “What had begun as a pseudo-scientific
way to define criminality while controlling large groups, ended as a
bureaucratic short-cut around civil protections.” “Crime in the Social
Order,” 260.
125. F. C. Daly, Manual of Criminal Classes Operating in Bengal (1916), 81.
V/27/160/8, APAC, BL.
126. Daly, “Indian Hereditary Criminal,” 110–111.
127. Note by R. B. Hughes-Buller, 8 April 1913, GOI Home (Pol) A, May
1913, Nos. 72–75, NAI.
128. R. Nathan, “Notes on the Sadhana Samaj, Mymensingh,” (1908) in TIB
II: 808–809; J. C. Nixon, “An Account of the Revolutionary Organizations
in Bengal Other than the Dacca Anushilan Samiti” (1917) in TIB II:
551–559; and R. B. Hyde, SP, Mymensingh, to IG, 3 March 1916,
Bengal Police Proceedings. A, September 1916, Nos. 16–17, APAC BL.
129. Note by R. H. Sneyd-Hutchinson, 5 November 1914, GOB Home (Pol)
130. CS to GOB to IG, 14 February 1916, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 168
of 1916, WBSA.
131. H. L. Salkeld, “Anushilan Samiti Dacca. Part I,” (1908) in TIB II: 39.
132. “Notes on Outrages Compiled in 1917 by Mr. J. C. Nixon, ICS. Volume
IX,” (1917) in TIB VI: 605–607.
133. J. E. Armstrong, “An Account of the Revolutionary Movement in Eastern
Bengal with Special Reference to the Dacca Anushilan Samiti. Parts I and
II. Volume I,” (1917) in TIB II: 395.
134. H. L. Salkeld, “Anushilan Samiti Dacca. Part I,” (1908) in TIB II: 37.
135. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 18–19, 157–158 and 177–178.
136. The IB believed that the while Ghosh’s “unnatural propensities” may
have contributed to the murder, the main reason was the information he
provided to the police. First Report by L. H. Colson, 17 January 1913,
and L. N. Bird, IB, to CS to GOB, 21 January 1913, GOB Home (Pol)
137. J. E. Armstrong, “An Account of the Revolutionary Organization in
Eastern Bengal with Special Reference to the Dacca Anushilan Samiti.
Parts I and II. Volume I,” (1917) in TIB II: 395.
138. Trials were conducted not by juries but by a tribunal of three colonial
officials; there was no appeal. Those convicted were liable to death or
transportation, with all of their property forfeited. Mark Condos,
“License to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in
Colonial India, 1867–1925,” Modern Asian Studies 50: 2 (2016), 479–
517. See also Mark Condos, The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making
of Colonial Power in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2017), 140–180; Mark Condos, “‘Fanaticism’ and the Politics of
Resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 58: 3 (2016), 717–745; and Elizabeth
Kolsky, “The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception:
Frontier ‘Fanaticism’ and State Violence in Colonial India,” American
Historical Review 120: 4 (2015), 1218–1246.
139. Condos, “License to Kill,” p. 484.
140. R. E. A. Ray, “Note on the Policy of the Terrorist Parties in Bengal,”
(1932) in TIB I: 747.
141. These provisions included the appointment of judges to hear trials with-
out jury in Bengal, and the admission of confessions of those subse-
quently murdered as admissible evidence. Charles S. Bayley, Acting
Governor, Eastern Bengal and Assam, to James Dunlop Smith, Private
Secretary to Viceroy, 15 November 1908, Minto Papers, MS 12769,
NLS. The DCI, H. A. Stuart, also unsuccessfully advocated implement-
ing an “almost identical” version of the MOA throughout India in the
following year, again in response to revolutionary violence in Bengal.
Condos, Insecurity State, 175, fn. 140.
142. Emphasis in original. David Petrie, “Minute on the present situation con-
sidered in relation to revolutionary crime and terrorism,” 1, 13, 15. 19
June 1929. GOI Home (Pol) No. 133 of 1930, IOR POS 32163, APAC
BL.
143. Condos, Insecurity State, 174–175.
144. E. D. Giles, “Terrorist Activity in India,” 13 September 1930, GOI
Home (Pol) No. 401 of 1930, NAI.
145. E. D. Giles, “Terrorist Activity in India,” 13 September 1930, GOI
Home (Pol) No. 401 of 1930, NAI.
146. Public & Judicial note, “Death Penalty for Attempted Murder,” nd
[1931] L/PO/6/75, APAC BL; and Condos, Insecurity State,
176–177.
147. Lord Minto to Col. Sir Arthur Bigge, Private Secretary to HRH the
Prince of Wales, 7 March 1910, Minto Papers, MS 12776, NLS.
148. A 1932 report on the Jugantar Party highlighted the “acts of goondaism
by the party.” Its author described these acts of “goondaism” as “of the
same type as members of the Dacca Sri Sangha [another revolutionary
organization] perpetrated in Dacca for many years in order to make
themselves feared.” R. E. A. Ray, “Report on the Jugantar Party of
Dinajpur District,” (1932) in TIB II: 1028–1029.
149. David French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency 1945–1967 (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 60–62.
150. The adaptation of legislation directed against “goondas” for use against
arms smugglers will be discussed in Chap. 6.
CHAPTER 3
Surveillance, Analysis, and Violence:

The Operations of the Bengal Police
Intelligence Branch
In 1932, members of the revolutionary Jugantar Party in northern Bengal

committed a series of acts that seemingly had little to do with the over-
throw of British rule. Members stole wigs and paint from a local theatrical
group and a bicycle from a local lawyer in the town of Dinajpur, both of
whom were too frightened to complain to the police. Around the same
time, a dozen revolutionaries assaulted several young men who had
objected to Jugantar’s efforts to recruit young Bengali women to its ranks.
The local party leader, Naren Ghosh, then threatened to shoot the men if
they complained to the police.
On one level, these acts illustrate the divergent attitudes among Bengali
Hindus regarding the revolutionary movement. While some residents of
Dinajpur supported the revolutionaries, others rejected their goal of
recruiting female members at a time when women had assumed a high
profile by participating in armed robberies and carrying out assassinations
of British colonial officials.1 (Shortly afterwards, the Dinajpur revolution-
aries suspended their efforts to recruit young women due to the displea-
sure of the local public.) The Bengal Police Intelligence Branch (IB)
attached a different meaning to the events, however. According to intelli-
gence officer R. E. A. Ray, these actions served a clear purpose in what
colonial authorities had come to categorize as “Bengali terrorism.”
Ray wrote:

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_3
76 M. SILVESTRI
Such exploits may appear petty to an uninstructed critic, but to a student of

terrorism in Bengal they have a special significance. Apart from the immedi-
ate purpose of such acts there is an underlying purpose which is to accustom
youthful members to risk and adventure so that in time they may cheerfully
face the risks involved in the commission of dacoities and murders.2
By the early 1930s, as Ray’s comments suggest, the Government of

Bengal had built up a voluminous literature on the revolutionary move-
ment. This archive was the product of a police intelligence apparatus
developed over the previous quarter-century, which produced analyses
ranging from the “history sheets” of individual revolutionary suspects to
reports encompassing the entire history of the revolutionary movement.
The former rested upon a myriad of small details about individual revolu-
tionaries, the assembly of which historian Keith Jeffery likened to the
construction of “a pointillist painting, containing tiny fragments of infor-
mation.”3 The assembly of these details led to the writing of histories of
the revolutionary movement, the construction of the new colonial stereo-
type of the “Bengali terrorist,” and the conviction of intelligence officers
that they could not only understand in intimate detail but also anticipate
the future actions of the revolutionaries. In this fashion, the anxieties of
colonial officials regarding the revolutionaries’ potential to disrupt the
Raj and assassinate colonial servants were transformed into an intelligence
apparatus focused intensively on investigating, analyzing, and neutraliz-
ing the revolutionary groups.
This chapter will examine how colonial intelligence and colonial con-
structions of the Bengali terrorist developed during the thirty-year revolu-
tionary campaign. Three broad—and interrelated—themes are woven
throughout: intelligence structures, intelligence-gathering, and intelli-
gence analysis.4 Intelligence involves a dialectical relationship between
individual agency and broader, structural forces, and as we will see, both
aspects were vital to the development of police intelligence in colonial
Bengal.5 The place of police intelligence within a colonial bureaucracy that
paid painstaking attention to record-keeping and classification led its offi-
cers to construct a “papereality” of the history of the revolutionary move-
ment, as its voluminous archive stood in as a substitute for the actual
activities of the revolutionaries.6 At the same time, the production of
police intelligence was a dynamic process, in which British and Indian
police officers, agents, and the Bengali revolutionaries all played an
important role.
3 SURVEILLANCE, ANALYSIS, AND VIOLENCE: THE OPERATIONS… 77
Accordingly, this chapter will begin with an analysis of the structure of

the police intelligence apparatus in Bengal and the ways in which the
Intelligence Branch sought to extend its reach into the districts of Bengal.
It will next explore the efforts of the IB to keep its information secure and
the important roles played by Indian officers, as well as their agents and
informers. Although British officers of the Indian Police boasted of the
analytic and investigative skills of the Intelligence Branch, the use of tor-
ture and coercion also formed part of the repertoire of tactics used to elicit
confessions and other information from revolutionaries. Finally, the chap-
ter will consider how British intelligence officers sought both to dissect
the nature of revolutionary activity on a minute level and construct over-
arching analyses that categorized and explained the motivations and
actions of the “Bengali terrorist.”
1 Organizing Colonial Intelligence: The Central

and District Intelligence Branches
The Bengal Police faced what Martin Thomas has described as “the prob-
lem inherent to colonial intelligence gathering: how to use a distrusted,
alien police force to discover what a hostile subject population intended.”7
While the guiding principle of the reorganization of the Indian Police in
1861 had been that of “salutary neglect,” over subsequent decades the
police in Bengal became more involved in the social networks and power
structures of rural villages. By the end of the nineteenth century, the police
had assumed the supervision of village chaukidars or watchmen in an
effort to make them “responsible agents” of colonial authority.8 The abil-
ity of police throughout India to place those suspected of involvement in
“bad livelihood” cases was expanded as the new category of “dangerous
character” was added to the list of those who could be subjected to restric-
tion and surveillance under the Criminal Procedure Code.9 As discussed in
the previous chapter, at the turn of the twentieth century, the small Special
Branch office of the police also made unsuccessful efforts to expand its
intelligence capacity throughout the districts of Bengal.
The rise of the revolutionary movement after the 1905 Partition of
Bengal threw up new challenges to the colonial state. In 1911, the Special
Department of the Bengal Police, the precursor to the Intelligence Branch,
observed that police officers throughout Bengal had realized “that the
campaign against political crime is of an entirely different nature and needs
78 M. SILVESTRI
to be conducted on entirely different lines to that against ordinary crime….

Secret plotting must in fact be met by secret enquiries, and it is in this
direction that the Special Department, abandoning largely the open
enquiry system, is now working.”10 Although police intelligence work
against the Bengal revolutionaries, particularly in its early years, owed a
considerable debt to earlier modes of colonial policing, the revolutionaries
forced the police to develop new organizational structures and new meth-
ods of surveillance and information-gathering.11
In the three decades following partition, the Bengal Police went from
having virtually no extant intelligence capacity to having an intelligence
structure which was perhaps unsurpassed in scale anywhere in the British
Empire. Over time, the size of the police intelligence apparatus increased
markedly. By 1935, the staff of the Intelligence Branch in Calcutta num-
bered more than 700. This intelligence apparatus was almost entirely
devoted to the surveillance of Bengali revolutionary organizations. In
contrast to the goals of earlier British intelligence-gathering efforts, which
sought a broader and deeper knowledge of currents in Indian society, cul-
ture, and politics, the Intelligence Branch had a narrow and intense focus
on a single variant of Indian nationalism. In this respect, the Bengal Police
Intelligence Branch anticipated post-Second World War colonial intelli-
gence agencies such as the Malayan Police Special Branch. The type of
“intelligence-led policing within a colonial context,” which was well
developed in Bengal by the beginning of the Second World War, thus
became an important tool of colonial governments faced with anticolonial
insurgency during the era of decolonization.12
Colonial intelligence-gathering involved the “steady accumulation of
information” on the state’s subjects, and police intelligence work against
the Bengali revolutionaries was no exception.13 The Intelligence Branch’s
headquarters was in Calcutta, which was both a center of revolutionary
organization and recruitment and a venue for revolutionaries to stage
attacks against high-ranking colonial officials. The IB’s offices on Elysium
Row became the locale where the vast amount of information collected
about revolutionaries was organized—or perhaps more precisely where
attempts to organize it were made. The Central IB staff produced pains-
taking analyses, ranging from reports on a single individual or revolution-
ary activity in a single district to histories of the revolutionary movement
over several decades. Over time, IB officers grew more specialized in their
responsibilities, and the categories to which resources were devoted indi-
cated the IB’s current priorities in its campaign against the revolutionaries.
By 1935, three superintendents supervised subordinate Indian officers

who focused their attention on eastern, western, and northern Bengal,
respectively. The western Bengal section was responsible for inter-
provincial revolutionary activity, censorship, photographs, the intercep-
tion of mail, the handling of agents and searches and investigations in
Calcutta, as well as watch duties. The latter involved surveillance at
Calcutta’s major railway stations, Howrah and Sealdah, the escort of
detainees to home domicile or detention camps, and the surveillance of
individuals and localities.14
The IB’s Confidential Office Section employed a deputy superinten-
dent, two inspectors, and 32 sub-inspectors. Six officers were employed
solely on indexing names, while another five focused on “referencing” or
preparing notes on references in the card index. One sub-inspector’s main
duty was “the marking of the numbers of the relevant folders on extracts
from agents’ statements which are intended to be added to the contents of
the folders.” Two sub-inspectors kept charge of the IB’s records and
maintained a card index showing to whom the intelligence files had been
issued. In the mid-1930s, 300 files were issued daily.15 A small staff under
the supervision of a superintendent prepared and revised the “history
sheets” on individual revolutionaries and suspected revolutionaries that
formed the core of the IB’s records. Separate sections were in charge of
censorship and matters related to detainees.
Although the size of the IB’s staff increased dramatically over the final
decades of colonial rule, this was not a linear process. The IB was greatly
reduced following the release of detained revolutionaries under the 1919
royal amnesty and the end of the noncooperation movement in early
1922. Later in the decade, a number of intelligence positions were kept
vacant after large numbers of revolutionaries had been detained under the
1925 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act. Intelligence officers con-
stantly bemoaned that they were not given adequate numbers to counter
a resilient revolutionary movement. In 1936, ICS officer H. J. Tywnam
and intelligence officer R. E. A. Ray concluded that in spite of the increased
numbers in the previous two decades, the IB’s growth had not kept pace
with the “relative intensity of the terrorist movement” or the increasing
demands that connections among revolutionaries from different Indian
provinces and the rise of Indian communism had placed on it (Table 3.1).16
While intelligence officers repeatedly pressed for a strong central intel-
ligence office in Calcutta, they also emphasized the need for police intel-
ligence to extend into Bengal’s provinces. Soon after colonial authorities
80 M. SILVESTRI
Table 3.1 Bengal Police Central Intelligence Branch Staff

1917 1923 1925 1935–1936
Special Superintendents 6 3 3 4
Deputy Superintendents 4 3 4 10
Inspectors 17 6 16 32
Sub-Inspectors 50 21 51 131
Sergeants – – – 1
Assistant Sub-Inspectors – 20 41 96
Head Constables 83 25 63 95
Constables 180 81 164 322
Clerks, Accountants, and so on 44 26 33 76
Total 384 185 376 767
These totals include both permanent and temporary IB staff. Source: H. J. Twynam and R. E. A. Ray,
Enquiry into Temporary Establishments of the Central and District Intelligence Branches of the Bengal Police
(1936), 64
became aware of revolutionary activity in 1907, subordinate officers of the

CID were deputed “to assist the Superintendents of Police in their confi-
dential work and to collect political intelligence,” an arrangement which
the Government of Bengal later observed “did not work well.”17 In 1911,
the Special Department (as the IB was known until 1912) had already
begun to place officers in selected districts with the authority “to assume
control of inquiries of a specially delicate or sustained character.”18 When
the Special Department was reconstituted as the Intelligence Branch in
the following year, thirty-six subordinate members of the police (six
inspectors, nine sub-inspectors, and twenty-one constables) were desig-
nated as “District Intelligence Officers” (DIOs) under the superinten-
dents in thirteen districts. Instructions circulated to police superintendents
across the province listed thirteen areas in which inspectors and sub-
inspectors were to compile reports in their confidential diaries, which were
then to be submitted to District Superintendents of Police. These included
nationalist activities such as political or mass meetings; “religious sects,
changes in doctrine and practices having a political significance”; assaults
by Europeans or Eurasians on Indians (and the reverse); and the move-
ments of and titles performed by jatra (yatra) groups, a traditional form
of Bengali folk theater. (Jatra performances, which already emphasized
social themes by the nineteenth century, increasingly carried commentary
on political issues and were thus considered worthy of the IB’s attention.)19
The broad range of topics on which the District Intelligence Officers

were to report, and the way in which they were expected to work through
District Superintendents of Police, recalled the methods by which Bengal’s
earlier Special Branch Office had attempted to obtain province-wide intel-
ligence. In addition, the DIOs were not a picked cadre of intelligence
officers, but were instead deputed from the local police. In 1913, two
inspectors and two constables were deputed from the CID, and the num-
bers were increased to eleven inspectors, fifteen sub-inspectors, and thirty-
seven constables. In 1916, over a hundred constables and head constables
were added for bodyguard duty, which brought the total numbers to 11
inspectors, 15 sub-inspectors, 43 head constables, and 126 constables.
Even so, in the following year, the Government of Bengal admitted that
“the revolutionary movement is now so widespread that it is impossible
any longer to control it effectively by means of a central organization such
as the Intelligence Branch, unaided by an adequate district staff.”20
In the same year, the Government of India approved a large increase to
the staff of what became known as the District Intelligence Branches
(DIBs). This almost tripled the police staff of the DIBs and brought at least
a theoretical intelligence presence into a half-dozen new districts in Bengal.
This extension of police intelligence was designed to provide a flexible and
mobile intelligence apparatus that would solve the persistent lack of intel-
ligence coordination between the districts and Central Intelligence Branch.
Five police superintendents were designated to oversee intelligence collec-
tion in the districts. The “plan of campaign” that the GOB outlined
against the organization of the revolutionary party, with its innumerable

ramifications spreading over the length and breadth of the province and its
centre in Calcutta, will be to maintain in the city a properly equipped central
agency, which will exercise a general control over Intelligence Branch work
in the districts, collate all information regarding anarchical activities received
from different sources and supply it to the districts, so as to maintain a con-
tinuous pressure on the conspirators and to keep Superintendents informed
of the state of affairs both in their own and in neighboring districts. The
actual attacks on the parties concerned must be left in the hands of the dis-
trict intelligence staff. It is in short the policy to make the Central Bureau
responsible for strategy and the district intelligence staff for tactics.21
Bengal thus became the first Indian province to establish an intelligence

organization at the district level.22 The Bengal Police envisioned a mobile
force of Indian detectives and intelligence officers, inspectors, and sub-
82 M. SILVESTRI
inspectors who could be transferred between different districts as needed.

The Inspector General, C. W. C. Plowden, acknowledged that the IB’s
problems with intelligence-gathering were due not only to the lack of
information coming from district police but also to the increasingly sophis-
ticated organization and operations of the revolutionaries. District
Intelligence Branches, in contrast, were “deficient both in material and
organization, and unable therefore to effectively cope with a highly organ-
ised conspiracy (Table 3.2).”23
The province was divided into four groups for the purposes of intelli-
gence work, and DIB Superintendents were expected to meet quarterly, or
monthly in the case of Group I, which included the eastern Bengal dis-
tricts deemed to be of the greatest importance. In the case of a revolution-
ary “outrage” or dacoity taking place in Group I, DIB Superintendents
were to hold an emergency meeting in Dacca in order to utilize “the entire
resources of the districts named on the investigation of the case.”24 The
local superintendent in charge of the DIB was to act as the “supreme
brain” for the investigation of revolutionary activities in the district, while
the Deputy Inspector General in charge of the IB was to fulfill a similar
function for the province. It was imperative that information not be with-
held from the latter officer, Plowden wrote, since “he alone is in a position
to gather up all the threads and to determine the exact value of the infor-
mation coming in from several channels, and he will often be able to assist
the district police by passing on information on record in the Intelligence
Branch closely connected with a line of enquiry which is being followed
up by the district police.”25
Table 3.2 Bengal Police District Intelligence Branch Staff

1917 1923 1925 1935
Additional Superintendents 3 2 2 3
Inspectors 20 7 16 33
Sub-Inspectors 51 26 43 113
Clerks 36 7 57 45
Sub-Inspector Clerks – 14 19 37
Assistant Sub-Inspectors – – 57 224
Head Constables 88 7 – –
Total 198 63 194 455
These totals include both permanent and temporary IB staff. Source: H. J. Twynam and R. E. A. Ray,
Enquiry into Temporary Establishments of the Central and District Intelligence Branches of the Bengal Police
(1936), 16
The Government of Bengal viewed the establishment of District

Intelligence Branches as a milestone in the campaign against revolutionary
terrorism. The information provided by DIB officers provided material for
detention orders issued under the Defence of India Act during the final
years of the Great War. In the IB’s view, this substantially aided its ability
to monitor the plans of revolutionaries throughout the province. In 1919,
the Government of Bengal observed that “for the first time in the history
of the [revolutionary] movement, the police has [sic] been in a position to
follow the ramifications of the conspiracy in the districts where the move-
ment is the most active, and the number of revolutionary outrages has
considerably diminished.”26 The Bengal Police came to regard the DIBs as
the most important element of its efforts to monitor the revolutionaries.
In reviewing the history of the Intelligence Branch in 1936, Twynam and
Ray observed that its main concern was the compilation and analysis of
information produced in the province’s districts. Although the Calcutta
IB had “other sources of information at its disposal, its function is in con-
siderable measure the collation and classification of information so received
and the pooling of the same for the benefit of the areas concerned.”27
2 Information and Secrecy

Colonial anxieties about the threat of revolutionary terrorism thus led to
the creation of a central and district-level intelligence apparatus in Bengal.
Although the Intelligence Branch was intended to be professional, pains-
taking, and comprehensive in its analyses, it also epitomized the tendency
of colonial bureaucracies, in India and elsewhere, to succumb to bureau-
cratic routine. Its expansive records, and the precision with which they
attempted to map and analyze the revolutionaries, led to the construction
of a “papereality” of the history of the revolutionary movement.28 The
revolutionary movement was thus seen in an important sense as static and
unchanging, and thus something that could be not only understood but
also whose behaviors could be predicted.
Colonial assumptions about Indian society—and in particular Bengali
Hindus—were easily transferred to the activities of revolutionaries. As
Mark Doyle has shown regarding communal violence in the British
Empire, cultural considerations had a considerable impact on the nature of
the policing of these disturbances. In particular, a set of “core cultural
assumptions” about the nature and behavior of indigenous peoples shaped
the nature of public order policing within the empire, where colonial offi-
84 M. SILVESTRI
cials regarded sedition with greater fear than criminality.29 The same was
true of intelligence work against the revolutionaries. As Priya Satia has
argued about the interwar British Empire in the Middle East, cultural
concerns could shape intelligence as much as geopolitical concerns. The
“cultural world” of colonial officials involving with the anti-terrorist cam-
paign in India was not identical to that of those elsewhere in the empire,
but just as in the Middle East, “a particular cultural lens refracted” their
intelligence reports.30 While new elements were brought into this cultural
world after the Great War, notably the impact of the Anglo-Irish conflict
and the Russian Revolution upon the revolutionaries, the analysis of intel-
ligence officers rested upon a deep base layer of colonial assumptions
about the nature of Bengali Hindus.
“History sheets” of individual revolutionaries formed the basis of intel-
ligence officers’ understanding of the activities of revolutionary organiza-
tions. These history sheets were maintained on both the rank and file and
leadership of revolutionary organizations, and normally gave brief descrip-
tions of the suspect’s family background before delving into a detailed
analysis of their connections to nationalist, revolutionary, and anticolonial
movements. Details of personal lives were included where they were
thought to shed light on the relationships with fellow revolutionaries,
reflecting what intelligence officers considered to be their comprehensive
knowledge of revolutionary organizations. The number of individuals
about whom the IB attempted to collect information reached dizzying
levels for an understaffed colonial bureaucracy. One Deputy Superintendent
in the Central IB calculated that 10,000 different names were mentioned
in reports he received during a single year, and that in 1934 he added
5000 pages to folders which he kept for his own information.31
In spite of the vast accumulation of paper and reports and accompany-
ing construction of a “papereality” in the intelligence archive, the colonial
intelligence-gathering against the revolutionaries was in an important
sense a dynamic process with an important human dimension. Daniel
Brückenhaus has noted “the complex interplay between the activities of
the surveillance agencies and those under surveillance.”32 Issues of trust
and suspicion linked the activities of colonial authorities involved in
intelligence-gathering and the revolutionaries who sought to keep their
organizations and plans secret.33 Intelligence officers had to gain the trust
of revolutionaries and persuade them to become agents and approvers.
Revolutionary groups in turn sought to police their own members and to
identify and eliminate those who might have betrayed their plans to colo-
nial authorities. In the opinion of former Bengal Police Inspector General

S. G. Taylor, the revolutionaries had a “reasonably good” system of intel-
ligence.34 At times, police attempting to carry out surveillance on revolu-
tionaries became themselves the subjects of revolutionary surveillance.35
The reverse was also true. In 1923, revolutionaries carrying out the sur-
veillance of police officers and their residences were in turn placed under
surveillance by police watchers who traced them “to places known to be
the haunts of the conspirators.”36
In addition to carrying out their own surveillance of police, revolution-
aries also made efforts to obtain confidential information and secret docu-
ments and to introduce their own members into the Bengal Police and
other branches of colonial administration. Family ties as well as those of
language, religion, caste, and socioeconomic status bound together
Bengali revolutionaries and Bengali members of the police, and it was far
from uncommon for the sons of police officers and other colonial servants
to become revolutionaries.37 Revolutionaries were adept at exploiting the
networks of empire, as their efforts to join imperial police and military
forces and gain access to intelligence reports demonstrated.38 In December
1940, prior to his escape from house arrest in Calcutta, Subhas Chandra
Bose was able to utilize a contact within the Government of Bengal to
obtain a copy of a confidential report about him and have it returned
unnoticed.39
The Intelligence Branch was forced to balance its desire to disseminate
information widely enough for ordinary police to be effective in aiding
with the monitoring and surveillance of the revolutionary movement with
maintaining the secrecy of its reports. Items which were too widely circu-
lated ran the risk of being obtained by nationalists. In 1914, substantial
excerpts from the Intelligence Branch’s memorandum on the methodol-
ogy of “political dacoities” were published in the Bengalee newspaper. The
memo had first been published confidentially in pamphlet form in July
1913, but had subsequently been reprinted six times in the Bengal Police’s
Criminal Intelligence Gazette, which the Government of Bengal believed
was the source of the material which appeared in the newspaper.40 Colonial
authorities’ fears of revolutionaries gaining access to secret information
remained a concern two decades later. In 1932, the Commissioner of
Rajshahi Division warned that instructions for the collection of informa-
tion on revolutionaries should be limited since “circulars have an awkward
habit of getting into the hands of newspaper editors if too many of them
are distributed.”41
86 M. SILVESTRI
In addition to restricting the intelligence disseminated within the

police, the Intelligence Branch also utilized the strategy of employing
Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) clerks. This marked another significant use of
colonial racial ideology in the service of the policing of revolutionaries, as
Anglo-Indians, who defined themselves as Britons rather than Indians,
were deemed to be more unswerving in their loyalties than Bengali
Hindus. By 1936, all of the forty-four clerks at the Central IB in Calcutta
were Anglo-Indians; so were the majority of the fifty-five clerks through-
out the province’s DIBs.42
Although this practice marked a significant exception to the Bengal
Police’s heavy reliance upon Bengali Hindus for intelligence work, nega-
tive stereotypes about Eurasians led some officers to continue to favor
Indian clerks. The Superintendent of Mymensingh District, P. E. S. Finney,
found his Eurasian DIB clerk, one Augley Harney, to be “most efficient,”
but complained about the poor quality and workplace conflicts of the
majority of his “unruly” Eurasian clerks who gave him “endless trouble”
and made plans to replace them with Indian police sub-inspectors.43 The
revolutionaries thus played a role not only in shaping the nature of police
intelligence through their statements and confessions but also placed con-
straints on the ability of the police to disseminate it, and raised the specter
of confidential intelligence being used against the police.
Bengali revolutionaries also made periodic efforts to enter the ranks of
the Bengal Police. While these efforts do not seem to have been successful,
they forced the Intelligence Branch, responsible for monitoring police loy-
alty, to devote resources to scrutinizing the recruitment of subordinate
police officers. In 1925, IB Deputy Inspector General J. E. Armstrong
issued orders that all applications for appointment at the rank of assistant
sub-inspector and above should be verified in the local District Intelligence
Branch office. Armstrong advised the Inspector General that “we have
information that revolutionaries contemplate introducing their agents
into the Police Department and I think that every precaution should be
taken to guard against this.”44 In 1931, the Governor of Bengal reported
that “for some years” the Intelligence Branch had been consulted not only
on police applicants but also on all applications for government service in
the province in order to bar those with “revolutionary connections.”45
These revolutionary efforts to enter the police only increased over time
and led to continuing scrutiny of applicants by local intelligence officers.
In the mid-1930s, Finney regularly consulted the DIB of the home district
of any Bengali who wished to enter the police in Mymensingh District,
while police were prohibited from recruiting anyone from the “politically
infamous” Chittagong District subdivision of Patiya, a center of revolu-
tionary activity.46 From 1930 to 1940, the Intelligence Branch recorded
161 persons who applied to serve in the Bengal Police, and another 87
who applied for Army and Military Department posts who were rejected
because of “connections with terrorist parties.” More than half of these
candidates for police positions applied in 1939 and 1940, which prompted
Deputy Inspector General R. E. A. Ray to observe that “careful scrutiny is
most necessary.”47
3 “The Courage of the Bengali Intelligence

Officer”: Indian Officers of the Intelligence
Branch
By the 1930s, British officers of the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch
displayed considerable confidence—almost to the point of smugness—
that they could interpret, understand, and anticipate the actions of revolu-
tionaries. The information and analyses accumulated by the IB had
seemingly neutralized colonial anxieties about the threat of “Bengali ter-
rorism.” Yet as Thomas has observed, “the world of colonial intelligence
gathering was never an entirely European one.”48 The Indian Police were
as racially stratified as other colonial police forces, and shaped according to
prevalent colonial attitudes about race, religion, and ethnicity in India.
British IB officers were deeply dependent on their Indian subordinates,
something that most were quick to acknowledge. Ray recalled, “Although
the direction of the campaign against the terrorists in Bengal was by British
officers, those who did the spade-work, who apprehended and obtained
from terrorists themselves the information on which preventive action
could be taken, who investigated the many outrages, who followed,
entirely protected, dangerous suspects were Bengalis.”49
This dependence on Indian subordinates began with the earliest efforts
of the colonial authorities to suppress the Bengali revolutionary move-
ment. The Alipore Bomb Trial, the first conspiracy case involving the
Bengali revolutionaries and one of the longest trials in the history of colo-
nial India, led to the conviction in 1910 of nineteen revolutionaries (fif-
teen of whose sentences were upheld on appeal).50 Although fewer than
half of the accused ultimately served penal sentences, the results of the
trial, in which over 1500 documents were produced, were often repre-
88 M. SILVESTRI
sented as a triumph of intelligence work for the relatively new Criminal

Investigation Department.51 Two of the leading British intelligence offi-
cers of the IB’s campaign against the revolutionaries, the Anglo-Irishman
Charles Tegart and the Englishman Godfrey Denham, whose careers will
be discussed in further detail in Chap. 7, played an important role in the
case. Tegart carried out many of the investigations while Denham “the
man with the remarkable memory,” was given “the colossal task of collat-
ing information, testing statements, checking evidence, following up clues
and preparing the police case.”52
Yet these lauded imperial intelligence officers were to a great degree
dependent on their Indian subordinates. An Indian police inspector testi-
fied at the trial that he and his colleagues read Bengali letters to Denham
and “explained the facts” to him while he took copious notes.53 The most
important police officer involved in the Manicktolla case was arguably not
Denham or Tegart but Khan Bahadur Shams-ul-Alam. Alam was a Deputy
Superintendent of Police, at the time the highest rank open to Indians,
and one of three Indian police officers considered for a permanent posting
at Scotland Yard in 1909. (The Government of India believed, however,
that he could not be spared until after the appeal in the case was com-
plete.)54 In his verdict, the appellate judge praised Alam’s “industry and
perseverance” in “mastering the details of this case.”55 Alam also seems to
have engaged, with the tacit approval of his superiors, in the alteration of
evidence.56
On 24 January 1910, he became the most prominent Bengal Police
officer to be assassinated when he was shot on the verandah of Alipore
courthouse by a young Bengali named Birendranath Dutta Gupta. Alam
was killed on the orders of the revolutionary leader Jotindranath
Mukherjee, and his murder was a mark of his importance to the prosecu-
tion of the Manicktolla group.57 The Deputy Inspector General of the
Special Department described Alam as “the most useful officer we had in
our Department,” and the Government of Bengal was solicitous in asking
whether Alam’s family wished money or a grant of land in recognition of
his service.58 Indeed, Alam’s death meant that the assassination of a lowly
Indian Police officer briefly dominated the affairs of the British-Indian
elite. The Viceroy Lord Minto reported to the Secretary of State for India
John Morley that “the gloom of his assassination” hung over the Viceroy’s
Council, and later described the officer to the Prince of Wales as “a most
excellent man.”59 The killing also marked the beginning of new govern-
ment offensive against the revolutionaries, which included the Press Act,
the Seditious Meetings Act, the Indian Criminal Law Amendment Act,
and the proposed deportation of fifty-three “‘leading agitators.’”60
While Alam and a few other prominent police intelligence officers were
Muslims, the vast majority of the Intelligence Branch’s Indian officers
were Bengali Hindus. These bhadralok policemen, typically upper-caste
Hindus, came from the same religious, cultural, and social world as did the
“gentlemanly terrorists” who were their adversaries.61 The Bengal Police
strongly and consistently demonstrated a preference for Hindus to popu-
late its Intelligence Branch. Just as the revolutionaries made adept use of
imperial networks in their planning and organization, Bengali intelligence
officers in turn were believed necessary to penetrate revolutionary net-
works and secure information about the revolutionaries.62
This preference for Hindu officers intersected with long-standing colo-
nial stereotypes about Bengalis as well. In particular, bhadralok Hindus
were considered to demonstrate a marked ability for intelligence work.
British officers frequently commented that their Indian subordinates pos-
sessed a “natural flair” for detective and intelligence work, but this gener-
alized colonial stereotype was applied with particular force to Bengali
Hindus.63 Bhadralok who were in other contexts categorized as “non-
martial,” effeminate, and overly emotional were seen as possessing the
vital qualities necessary for detective work, usually described as cunning or
calculated cleverness. One intelligence officer maintained:
The Bengali has often been a subject of scorn for his alleged lack of daring
and courage. This is completely unfair and unjustified. He is not a martial
type like the Punjabi, and the Rajput, and other races who formed the back-
bone of the Indian Army. But there are dozens of cases of the courage of the
Bengali Intelligence Officer, rarely in the heat of battle, but after coolly
calculating the risks of the duty he was performing.64
John Hunt, later the organizer of the first successful Everest expedition in
1953, served as a Military Intelligence Officer attached to the Bengal
Police in the 1930s.65 He described an accomplished Bengali intelligence
officer with praise tempered by the derision of colonial officials for the
“non-martial” Bengali. The officer appeared, Hunt wrote, “apart from
the .38 revolver strapped to his dhotied waist,” no different “from any of
the clerks and shopkeepers whom we British army officers used to dub as
indolent, devious, and spineless.” Nonetheless, according to Hunt, he
“shared with most Bengali Hindus a crafty mind which he brought to bear
on the machinations of the young terrorists.”66
90 M. SILVESTRI
To be sure, several prominent Bengal Police intelligence officers were

Muslims, beginning with Shamsul Alam. Yet although Muslims made up
around a third of the officers of the Bengal Police in the interwar period,
few became members of the Intelligence Branch.67 While the IB consid-
ered Muslims extremely unlikely to sympathize with the almost exclusively
bhadralok Hindu revolutionaries, they also deemed them unable to pene-
trate terrorist networks themselves or successfully handle informers. In
1930, the Inspector General of the Bengal Police opined that with one or
two exceptions, Muslims were “useless” for Intelligence Branch work.68
The Government of India, however, criticized the Bengal Police for being
too reliant on bhadralok officers. The Director of the Intelligence Bureau
of the Government of India, Sir Horace Williamson, argued in racialized
terms that Muslims—in particular those from North India who were con-
sidered to be more “martial”—would enhance the IB’s capacity to thwart
“Bengali terrorism”:
Some years ago I heard, and I have heard it repeatedly since, that only a
Bengali police officer can deal with a Bengali terrorist. This statement has
been disproved in its entirety in the U. P. and the Punjab and I have no hesi-
tation in saying that the successes gained in these two Provinces against
terrorists have been very largely due to the strong personalities of up-
country police officers, especially Muslims.69
In spite of the DCI’s protestations, however, the Indian officer corps of

the IB remained dominated by bhadralok Hindus throughout the final
decades of colonial rule. They came from the same social milieu as the
revolutionaries, and indeed were sometimes linked to them by family or
personal connections. Indian intelligence officers were particularly held in
contempt by many of their countrymen, and their critical role in
investigations often subjected them to assassination attempts. Over two
decades after Indian independence, a former Intelligence Branch officer
argued against including the names of Indian officers in a history of the
Indian Police, which he believed would open their families to revenge
from former revolutionaries.70
Over the three decades of the revolutionary movement, the Intelligence
Branch made efforts to cultivate the Indian officers of the IB as an elite
and self-selecting group. The Inspector General of the Bengal Police esti-
mated in 1932 that only ten percent of subordinate Indian officers were
suited for intelligence work, and that it took an inspector or sub-inspector
who had experience with “ordinary” police work six months to become a
useful IB officer.71 Yet the IB faced periodic crises over the loyalty of its
Indian officers, particularly in the first decade of its existence. By 1913, a
number of officers in the Intelligence Branch “had practically thrown up
the sponge” in the face of retaliatory attacks on the police.72 Three years
later, the Inspector General concluded that “we now have to face the fact
that murders of police officers engaged in dealing with revolutionary
crime are being systematically and carefully planned and executed by the
revolutionists.” As a result, the Intelligence Branch was experiencing
“considerable difficulty” in persuading officers to remain in the IB and in
recruiting new members, in spite of the granting of special allowances.73
All four of the Deputy Superintendents in the IB had recently expressed
their desire to leave, while four inspectors and ten sub-inspectors had ten-
dered their resignations.74 The IG stressed that even within the Intelligence
Branch, certain officers were exposed to greater risk of assassination.
“Certain officers who are digging deep down into the depths of the revo-
lutionary conspiracy,” he wrote, “run a very much greater risk and are
doing a very much greater service to Government than those who are
employed in duties which may be described as of a more ordinary or rou-
tine nature.”75
The Bengali officer whom colonial officials regarded as the epitome of
the Indian intelligence officer, Deputy Superintendent Basanta Kumar
Chatterjee, also became the most prominent Indian target of the revolu-
tionaries during the Great War. Chatterjee was widely recognized as the
leading officer of the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch, and his death in
June 1916 nearly brought intelligence efforts to a halt. Chatterjee had
been involved in intelligence work for several years, and had served as the
assistant, confidante, and “guru” in intelligence matters to Charles
Tegart.76 Chatterjee’s skills were said to lie in persuasion rather than
coercion, and he was reputed for his ability to extract information from
Bengali revolutionaries and to persuade them to abandon the revolution-
ary cause. Former Indian Police officer J. C. Curry regarded Chatterjee as
the embodiment of the traits that made Bengalis “good detectives,”
describing him as “a Bengali of the finest type, wise, courageous and intel-
ligent, who had had a strong influence for good on the young revolution-
aries with whom he had come in contact.”77
Chatterjee had already been the target of an assassination attempt in
November 1914, when two bombs had exploded during a meeting with
Indian intelligence officers at his home in north Calcutta. One policeman
92 M. SILVESTRI
was killed and two others wounded, along with one of Chatterjee’s rela-
tives. Subsequently, the police took the unusual step of relocating him to
a largely European neighborhood in south Calcutta in an attempt to pro-
tect him from the revolutionaries. But on the evening of 30 June 1916, as
Chatterjee dismounted his bicycle outside of his home after returning
from the Intelligence Branch offices on Elysium Row, five young Bengali
men drew revolvers and shot him and a police constable who was guarding
his residence. The constable was wounded; Chatterjee died an hour later
without regaining consciousness. No witnesses to the shooting
came forward.
Chatterjee’s assassination in spite of the precautions taken to protect
him created a crisis for the Intelligence Branch. Over the previous decade,
the Bengal Police had worked to transform the Intelligence Branch into an
elite service with networks of informants and an encyclopedic knowledge
of the various revolutionary factions in Bengal.78 Chatterjee’s murder,
threatened to create a mass exodus of its Indian officers, who increasingly
feared for their lives. Tegart held a meeting with the Indian officers of the
Intelligence Branch in which he offered them the chance to leave their
posts and return to ordinary police duties; although some chose to leave,
most opted to stay.79 Undoubtedly, the IB had had some success in build-
ing a professional ethos, and Indian officers of the IB tended to form close
personal bonds with their British superiors with whom they shared not
only intelligence work, but also a common threat of assassination. When
Tegart was targeted in a shooting that killed another British officer in
Palestine in 1939, his former Indian colleagues in the IB offered their
sympathies; one commented that the attack reminded him of the
“Dalhousie Square outrage” in which revolutionaries attacked the Writers’
Building.80
Yet another factor was the increased pay rates for intelligence officers,
and colonial authorities reassured Indian intelligence officers that their
families would be provided for in case of their assassination. Senior Calcutta
Police officers made a point of attending the cremation ceremonies of
intelligence officers killed by the revolutionaries to convey “to the relatives
themselves the regret and sympathy of [the] Government.”81 In
Chatterjee’s case his wife, sister, and mother were all awarded grants for
life and his children until they reached maturity; the family was also
awarded an additional Rs. 1500 for the dowry of one daughter, as well as
Rs. 1000 for shradh, or mourning expenses. These payments were publi-
cized in the local press.82 Leaving the IB also meant leaving behind the
protection of the armed guards provided to Indian intelligence officers,

and left no guarantee that intelligence officers who had probed deeply into
the plans of the revolutionaries would not continue to be targets.
Chatterjee’s death was not an isolated incident, but the culmination of
more than a decade of attacks by Bengali revolutionaries against the Indian
officers of the Bengal Police. From 1908 to 1918, revolutionaries assassi-
nated twenty-three Indian members of the police, including three Deputy
Superintendents. There were a further seven assassination attempts, as
well as several cases in which bombs were thrown into police stations.83
These murders and attempted assassinations were a recognition of the
critical role that Indian intelligence officers played in efforts to suppress
the revolutionary movement in Bengal. Like the assassination of Alam,
Chatterjee’s murder helped spur the Government of Bengal into the
increased use of detention without trial, which in this instance meant a
broader use of the Defence of India Act. In the judgment of R. E. A. Ray,
it was only after Chatterjee’s assassination “that –to quote the Bengal
Admin Rep [sic] for 1916—‘Government has been compelled to use freely
the instrument it possesses in the DI Act.” [sic]84
In spite of the Intelligence Branch’s efforts to shore up the support of
Indian officers, their loyalty was shaken once again during the noncoop-
eration campaign and the resurgence of the revolutionary movement fol-
lowing the Great War. In January 1920, Bengali intelligence officers from
districts throughout the province took advantage of a meeting in Calcutta
of District Intelligence Officers to found an organization of Indian police
officers. The newly formed Bengal Police Association passed resolutions
demanding that the pay of inspectors be doubled from Rs. 200 to 400,
and the pay of sub-inspectors increased by forty percent to Rs. 175.
Superintendent S. C. Kanjilal of the Bogra DIB presided and Deputy
Superintendent S. C. Majumdar of the Intelligence Branch was elected
president of the executive committee.85 The years from 1920 to 1922 saw
considerable unrest among the police in Bengal, as they also contemplated
strike actions and expressed support for Mohandas Gandhi and swaraj. An
important function of the Intelligence Branch was to monitor discontent
within the Bengal Police, and the Intelligence Branch archive features a
series of voluminous files on police attitudes toward nationalism in this
period. In March 1921, a circular letter was sent to all districts enquiring
about police attitudes toward noncooperation.86 While districts across the
province reported much discontent over pay as well as interest in nonco-
operation, the Intelligence Branch felt confident in the loyalty of its men.
94 M. SILVESTRI
Deputy Inspector General G. W. Dixon was able to report “unhesitat-

ingly” that the Intelligence Branch’s Indian officers were “one and all
thoroughly loyal and entirely indifferent to the movement. They are, of
course, well paid and also well aware of the fact that any suggestion of
impropriety would result in transfer and subsequent loss of emoluments.”87
Nonetheless, there were many disquieting signs of wavering loyalties.
At the meeting of the British India Police Conference in December 1921,
Bengal Police Deputy Superintendent Purna Chandra Biswas, who as a
CID inspector had supervised the surveillance of the Manicktolla Garden
revolutionaries in 1908, invoked the sacrifice of Indian members of the
Intelligence Branch in calling for improvements to police pay and working
conditions:
It is members of our department that fought out anarchism in the past and
is combating the non-cooperation movement in the present political crisis of
the country, but with what result? It is the members of our department who
have shed their best blood in their faithful discharge of duty. Where are
Khan Bahadur Shamsul Alam, Babu Basanta Kumar Chatterji, Jatindra
Mohan Ghosh and Madhn [sic] Sudan to-day? … Let their departed souls
now see how shabbily their comrades are being treated to-day, with respect
to pay and prospects.88
While the abrupt end of the noncooperation campaign in February 1922

ended the prospect of widespread police unrest in Bengal, the involvement
of some Indian intelligence officers called attention to their crucial role
within the Intelligence Branch. This will be explored further in the follow-
ing section.
4 Approvers, Agents, and Informers

IB officers claimed expertise in up-to-date investigative technology as well
as their skill in monitoring and analyzing the revolutionaries. Police intel-
ligence officers utilized forensic technologies such as photography and
fingerprinting, and intercepted the letters and decrypted codes used by
revolutionaries. IB inspector Jamini Mohan Banerjee testified that he had
decoded more than 500 ciphers used by revolutionaries between 1919
and 1935.89 At times, this yielded valuable results. When Anushilan Samiti
leader Prabhat Chakravarti was arrested in January 1933, he was carrying
in cipher the addresses of revolutionary associates in Bengal and elsewhere
in India, which after decoding helped to reveal the plans of Bengali revo-
lutionaries to establish connections with the Hindustan Socialist
Republican Association in north India in what became known as the Inter-
Provincial Conspiracy Case.90 According to P. E. S. Finney, the staff of the
Calcutta Police Special Branch by the 1930s was “very experienced in
dealing with intercepted letters as this was a regular feature of our investi-
gation into Communist and terrorist parties,” skills that were later trans-
ferred to the surveillance of Germans in India prior to the beginning of
the Second World War.91
Most intelligence work directed against the Bengali revolutionaries
was, however, what would today be termed “human intelligence.” Over
the thirty-year revolutionary campaign in Bengal, agents, typically mem-
bers of revolutionary groups, provided the bulk of information that led to
the wide-scale preventive detention of revolutionaries, the primary means
through which colonial authorities sought to counter the movement. This
dependence was in common with intelligence practices elsewhere in the
colonial world, where prior to 1939, authorities derived the bulk of intel-
ligence from human sources.92 As in other aspects of the colonial policing
of Indian revolutionaries, intelligence officers frequently borrowed from
the practices of the policing of Indian criminality.93 The compilation of
“history sheets” of convicted and suspected revolutionaries was not a new
invention of the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch. The Indian Police
Commission of 1902–1903 had recommended that local sub-inspectors
maintain village crime registers.94 Indeed, the term “history sheeter” was
incorporated into vernacular vocabularies of criminality across India.95
Intelligence officers made a distinction between three categories of
informants: approvers, informers, and agents. “Approver,” like the history
sheet, was a concept that had a long colonial genealogy. It referred to a
member of a criminal or revolutionary organization who testified in court.
Yet it was fundamentally a concept that belonged to the world of colonial
policing rather than judicial process.96 The overwhelming proportion of
the colonial archive regarding thuggee was compiled from the testimony
of approvers.97 According to R. E. A. Ray, an informer was a source who
“though not a member of revolutionary party and unable therefore to give
information about party matters, was able to give information of use
sometimes and, say, about premises the occupations of which seemed sus-
picious.” The critical category was the agent, “a member of a revolution-
ary party who gave information to an intelligence officer.”98
96 M. SILVESTRI
Although approvers played a critical role in establishing revolutionary

conspiracies, as the use of detention without trial became the favored colo-
nial method of suppressing the revolutionary movement, the importance
of agents assumed even greater importance.99
Indian intelligence officers were considered to be of vital importance in
the recruitment and handling of informers within the various revolution-
ary groups. In 1932, the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch reported that
they employed 853 agents, who collectively accounted for 17,293 pages
of information.100 Only a “very small number” of the statements were
shown to Bengal Government officials outside the Intelligence Branch.101
Tegart argued in 1927 that
we are dependent in our efforts to deal with the conspiracy, as we have

always been, solely on agents inside it, who incur serious danger in giving us
information…. Our experience during the last twenty years affords conclu-
sive proof of the correctness of the information supplied by agents…. The
only method of getting information about the terrorist movement is from
sources within the terrorist ranks.102
Five years later Intelligence Bureau Director Horace Williamson made a

similar point: the “main method of fighting terrorism in Bengal for the last
quarter of a century had been that of ‘getting inside’ the conspiracy. This
entails the employment of agents who are, or have been, themselves
terrorists.”103
In almost all cases, the British officers of the Bengal Police were depen-
dent on their Indian subordinates for the recruitment and handling of
agents. Bengali inspectors and sub-inspectors were considered to be the
“backbone” of District Intelligence Branches, in large part due to their
work in recruiting agents.104 P. E. S. Finney, who later served with MI5 in
Britain and India during the Second World War, was appointed as an
Intelligence Branch Special Superintendent in 1931 to assist with the writ-
ing of history sheets for detainees. Finney found that the information in
the sheets was almost exclusively composed of the testimony of informers,
who were recruited by Bengali inspectors and sub-inspectors, as well as
two Bengali superintendents. He added, “These Bengali officers did a
very fine job and few people realise how much we owe them.”105 Former
Bengal police officer T. G. H. Holman agreed that Bengali officers were
the key to the effectiveness of the District Intelligence Branches.
According to Holman
the front line of defense against the assassin was the Bengali police officer,
mostly of the rank of Inspector or Sub-inspector, appointed to the various
Intelligence Branches throughout the province. These men worked in plain
clothes and it was their business to collect information from sources of their
own contriving.106
Holman recalled that he did not know a single European officer in

Bengal who controlled an agent of “any consequence.”107 Tegart seems to
have been one of the few British officers who dealt directly with agents,
some of whose identities were known only to him. Meeting directly with
agents appealed to his flamboyant personality and relish for “cloak and
dagger” intelligence work, as he met his informants “always at night, in
some lonely place previously agreed on, and rarely took notes but com-
mitted the whole of what he was told to memory.”108 Most arrangements
with agents were more prosaic, however, and took place in close collabo-
ration with Indian officers. Finney emphasized that the process of recruit-
ing an agent was a lengthy one, and that “an informer was recruited
almost entirely through the moral ascendancy of the officer dealing
with him.”109
The motivations of agents and informers were varied and complex, and
the decision to become an informant rarely, if ever, resulted from the
explanation often given by colonial police officers: the influence of a sym-
pathetic police officer who persuaded the former revolutionary to see “the
error of their ways.” Rather, the desire to avoid imprisonment and achieve
personal and financial gain were significant factors, as well as at times disil-
lusionment with or political opposition to revolutionary groups. Ideas of
loyalty could both deter and inspire revolutionaries to testify against their
colleagues.110 As Aparna Vaidik argues, the decision to turn approver,
agent, or informer “was not always a product of police repression,
covetousness for pecuniary benefits, or weakness of character. Notions of
honour, guilt and filial loyalty also worked both to constrain and make
approvers of revolutionaries.”111 Some revolutionaries who cooperated
with the police tailored their confessions so as to inflict the minimum
amount of harm on their associates.
A series of three statements made by the Chittagong revolutionary
Ananta Lal Singh in 1925 illustrate many of the strategies that revolution-
aries used when providing information to the Intelligence Branch.
Although Singh provided detailed information about the revolutionaries
in Chittagong, in a number of places his statements were either vague—
98 M. SILVESTRI
perhaps intentionally so—or contained information that the IB already

knew or did not see as credible. Singh stated at the outset that he had
renounced the revolutionary movement and that “violent methods cannot
do good to the country.” The revolutionary who introduced him to
Jugantar had “long been reformed,” Singh noted, and was well known to
the local IB. In a number of instances, he could not recall the names of
revolutionaries, or did not know their real identities, knowing them only
by names such as “Mr. Black,” “Mr. Hot,” and “Double Moorings Boy.”112
IB Superintendent Ray clearly thought Singh a credible source, and
reproduced all three statements as an appendix to a report on the activities
of the revolutionaries during 1924–1925. In his analysis Ray noted that
Singh was a “very active member of the Chittagong revolutionary party”
and had taken “an active part in most of their criminal activities.” Some of
the information that Singh provided about armaments, such as details of
the manufacture of oval-shaped bombs, could be corroborated, and Ray
did not find his claim that he had “personally fitted strikes to 500 bomb-
shells in Calcutta and Chittagong” to be implausible. Yet at the same time
he noted that Singh claimed to have taken part in a robbery in which he
did not participate, and expressed skepticism about both his claims to have
been shown a machine gun by other revolutionaries and his report of the
revolutionaries’ possession of 10,000 bomb shells. Ray attributed the lat-
ter to the efforts of revolutionary leaders “to enhance their own impor-
tance in the eyes of their juniors.”113
The final chapter of Singh’s career as a member of Jugantar came five
years later, after he had returned to revolutionary politics and helped to
lead the attack known as the Chittagong Armoury Raid in April 1930.114
On 28 June 1930, just two months after the raid, Singh appeared at the
Intelligence Branch headquarters on Elysium Row and surrendered to the
police, handing over three slips of paper on which were written his name
and the names of the Inspector General of Police, F. J. Lowman, and two
Indian IB officers, Superintendent Nalini Majumdar and Inspector
Manmatha Nath Sen. In a letter addressed to Lowman, he described his
surrender to the police as “my personal matter and absolutely private.”
The IB initially was puzzled as to whether Singh’s surrender “was part of
some grand scheme that the revolutionaries had hatched to continue their
offensive.” They ultimately decided that he surrendered after a quarrel
with another of the leaders of the raid, Ganesh Ghosh, which the IB saw
as yet another example of how the revolutionaries’ seemingly inscrutable
actions could be made comprehensible through detailed analysis by colo-

nial officers.115 Once again, however, Singh’s surrender to the police did
not mean that he had abandoned the revolutionary cause; once he was
reunited with Ghosh while awaiting trial, he was involved in planning a
new revolutionary offensive.116
5 Torture and Coercion

From the outset of the revolutionary movement in Bengal, the decision to
turn approver, informer, or agent—regardless of whether the motive was
despair, coercion, fear of punishment, a desire for personal gain or a genu-
ine opposition to the revolutionaries’ methods—involved the threat of
violent retribution. British intelligence officers emphasized the dangers
that agents faced as well as their limited ability to protect them:
Once leakage of information was discovered by the revolutionary leaders it

was easy for them to narrow down their search for the talker; those sus-
pected would then be watched and shadowed and when once the leaders felt
reasonably sure of having fastened the blame for the leakage on to one par-
ticular man they would decide on his immediate murder. More than once
they made a mistake and murdered instead a keen supporter but naturally
many agents also met their death.117
They also emphasized what they considered to be the ruthlessness of the

revolutionaries in punishing suspected informers by torture and execution
“on suspicion or on the unsupported testimony of one person.”118
Although colonial officials were eager to publicize the retribution of
revolutionaries against suspected informers, they were much more reticent
in acknowledging how police coercion and violence contributed to deci-
sions to provide confessions or turn informant. British police officers
involved with intelligence work sometimes depicted the campaign against
the Bengal revolutionaries in a lighthearted fashion. Tegart was said to
have regarded the “innumerable” plots on his life “as part of a game,”
referring to an article urging the assassination of police officers as “‘a piece
of saucy writing.’”119 Another officer “sensed adventure and excitement”
in the campaign against the revolutionaries.120 But while these representa-
tions would not have been out of place in Boy’s Own Paper, violence was
at the core not only of the revolutionary campaign, but of the responses of
the colonial state to “Bengali terrorism.”
100 M. SILVESTRI
Both everyday violence and more systematic forms of state violence

were intrinsic to colonial rule in India and other parts of the empire.121
Much of this violence and coercion was carried out by the Indian Police,
which made them targets as well as perpetrators of violence.122 Torture by
subordinate Indian members of the police was first identified as a wide-
spread problem by colonial authorities in the mid-nineteenth century.123
The use of torture by the Indian police persisted into the twentieth cen-
tury, despite efforts to modernize and professionalize the force. Although
British-Indian commentators were quick to label police torture the prod-
uct of deficiencies in the “native character” and the paltry compensation
of police, the lack of separation of executive and judicial powers in the Raj
and the tacit toleration of abuses by police superintendents and District
Magistrates were more important reasons for the persistence of abuse.124
As Superintendent in Barrackpore District in the late 1920s, P. E. S. Finney
had to dismiss six percent of his men in the armed police and “had no less
than 20 convicted for such offenses as torture, extortion, and in one case
manslaughter.”125
While the use of torture by members of the Indian Police remained
widespread, and was the subject of colonial and parliamentary inquiries as
well as much commentary in the vernacular and English-language press, it
was nonetheless a largely invisible subject for colonial officials. British
accounts implicating British police officers in incidents of torture are
exceedingly rare.126 This reluctance to acknowledge the existence of tor-
ture reflected the attitude that such abuses were “a matter … deeply affect-
ing the honour of the British nation, and … utterly repugnant to the
principles of government.”127 More broadly, the focus on the violence of
revolutionaries rather than the police represented a strategy of deflection
away from colonial deployment of violence and toward the liberal and
“civilizing” vision of imperial rule.128 In this formulation, it was the
“Bengali terrorists,” rather than the Bengal Police, who represented not
only violence and disorder, but also who stood in the way of progress and
reform.129
In many cases, intelligence officers, who became practiced interroga-
tors, found that threats and persuasion could achieve their goals; some
revolutionaries whose cooperation was sought by the police were surprised
at the good treatment that they received.130 British officers who condoned
the abuse of prisoners typically left such tasks to their Indian subordi-
nates.131 The problem of assessing the use of torture by members of the
Bengal Police against revolutionaries is compounded by the fact that, as in
other locales in the British Empire, Government of Bengal files that

detailed abuses were likely destroyed before their handover to Indian
authorities.132 When Rajat Kanta Ray became the first historian granted
access to Intelligence Branch records and the confidential files of the
Government of Bengal Home Department in the 1980s, a clerk with
experience of these records asserted that departing British officials
destroyed “incriminating” files in 1947.133 Yet despite the vetting of files,
memoirs and oral histories—as historians have argued for other locales in
the British Empire—contradict the surviving archival record.134 The recol-
lections of revolutionaries are filled with descriptions of the brutal treat-
ment they received in the custody of the Bengal and Calcutta Police.
Beatings and torture were typically carried out by Indian subordinates.135
Female revolutionaries reported having pins stuck under their fingernails
and being forced to remain seated for three days without food and water.136
For the revolutionaries, who were mostly members of the bhadralok,
torture, like imprisonment, was transformed from something associated
with the lower classes to a mark of their commitment to the revolutionary
cause.137 To have been interrogated at the headquarters of the Bengal
Police Intelligence Branch or the Calcutta Police Special Branch head-
quarters became a badge of honor. According to Nirad C. Chaudhuri:
For us Bengalis one street of the area came to acquire a dreaded notoriety.
It was Elysium Row…. But the pleasantness of the name … [was] wholly
smothered by the fear inspired by Number Fourteen, the headquarters of
the Special Branch or the political police. There were few Bengali young
men with any stuff in them who did not have dossiers in Number 14, and
many of them had to go there in person, to be questioned or to be tortured,
or to be sent off to a detention camp. To have been in Elysium Row came
to be regarded as equivalent to being branded on the forehead or having a
ribbon on the chest, according to the standpoint or courage of the dra-
gooned visitor.138
British police officers considered revolutionaries’ complaints of ill-

treatment and torture by the police to be fabricated and “as much part and
parcel of the revolutionary movement as … murders and dacoities.”139
The allegations of torture and abuse of prisoners in a 1918 complaint by
the Indian Home Rule Party leader Annie Besant were found to be
“entirely false” and “utterly groundless.” The inquiry indignantly rejected
the possibility that “brutal and systematic torture was carried out … prac-
102 M. SILVESTRI
tically in the presence” of Tegart and Francis Lowman, the heads of the IB
and the Special Branch at the time, and
two intelligent and well-educated English [sic] gentlemen with distin-

guished service in the police force. It is quite impossible for us to conceive
that two officers with their training and traditions could countenance such
practices, and we reject the accusation without the smallest hesitation as too
ridiculous to deserve a moment’s consideration.140
Lowman was subsequently assassinated by revolutionaries in 1930

while serving as Inspector General of the Bengal Police, and Tegart was
the subject of numerous unsuccessful assassination attempts. While inves-
tigative zeal was one reason for the targeting of Indian and British police
officers for assassination, so was the physical abuse of revolutionaries. In
August 1931, revolutionaries in Chittagong District assassinated the
Muslim IB officer Khan Ahsanullah, whom the Government of Bengal
described as “the mainstay of the prosecution” in the first Chittagong
Armoury Raid trial, adding that “his death inflicts a severe loss on the
police.”141 Revolutionaries considered Ahsanullah to be a particularly bru-
tal officer who was given free rein to carry out beatings, torture, and other
abuses. Ahsanullah’s assassin, Haripada Bhattacharya, recalled that he was
a personal victim of his brutal methods. Bhattacharya and another dozen
or so men were picked up in a raid and beaten “black and blue” by police
under Ahsanullah’s command. Ahsanullah was also believed responsible
for torturing Ambica Chakravarty, one of the leaders of the Chittagong
Armoury Raid.142
Tegart enjoyed a similar reputation for brutal treatment of revolution-
aries. Jatin Chakrabarti, later a government minister in West Bengal, sym-
pathized with the revolutionary societies as a student in the 1920s, and
recalled Tegart’s “very, very notorious reputation” and how “went out of
his way to try out methods of torture on the revolutionaries.”143 Although
Tegart was absolved of any wrongdoing in the case brought by Annie
Besant, and urged the Government of Bengal to take measures to “safe-
guard” police from “malicious charges of ill-treatment in the future,”144 a
former Indian Police colleague recalled that his favorite interrogation
technique was to fire a loaded revolver above a suspect’s head, and then
place the gun next to his head before asking a question.145 In the case
brought by Besant, the revolutionary Ananta Haldar accused Tegart of
kicking and slapping him, as well as threatening to shoot him.146 When the
Bengali revolutionary M. N. Roy was detained in New York City during

the Great War, he found that he was not intimidated by the “third degree”
interrogation to which he was subjected at “The Tombs,” the Manhattan
House of Detention. Although Roy’s examiner sounded like “the vicious
hissing of a viper … it did not nonplus one accustomed to similar encoun-
ters with the Denhams and Tegarts of the British-Indian C. I. D.”147
6 History Sheets and Revolutionary Histories

The voluminous information compiled from agents, informers, and other
sources, obtained via a combination of coercion, persuasion, and the indi-
vidual motivations of former revolutionaries, contributed to a growing
sense of British confidence in matters relating to intelligence. More spe-
cifically, this confidential archive formed the basis of the reports produced
by the Bengal Police IB during the final decades of colonial rule. These
included thousands of reports on individual revolutionary suspects, rang-
ing from a few paragraphs to twenty pages or more, as well as analyses
dealing with specific aspects of the revolutionary movement or encom-
passing the entire history of “Bengali terrorism.” Although the Bengal
revolutionaries have frequently been criticized for their factionalism, lack
of organization, and general ineptitude in terms of their revolutionary
acts, the colonial archive conveys a different story. The issue is not simply
the volume of information collected about the revolutionaries, which was
considerable, but the attention devoted to dissecting and analyzing their
activities over three decades. As Partha Chatterjee has observed, “The
series of official reports on the armed nationalist groups … is richly
detailed, meticulous, and frequently brilliantly analytic, testifying to the
seriousness with which the colonial establishment took the terrorist
threat.”148
The “brilliantly analytic” quality of these reports does not of course
mean that they were neutral, or accurate in their assessments.149 Nor, how-
ever, were they merely composed of fantasies told to credulous British
colonial officials.150 Files constructed entirely (or at least primarily) of tes-
timony by informers could simultaneously contain myriad distortions,
exaggerations, and inaccuracies alongside a narrative of events and indi-
viduals’ activities that was generally accurate.151
In some instances, the history sheet of a particular revolutionary could
be based upon a single source of information. In 1924, Premananda Dutta
was accused of the murder of IB Sub-inspector Prafulla Kumar Ray in
104 M. SILVESTRI
Chittagong. Dutta had met with Ray shortly before his murder, but was
acquitted, and his innocence was upheld on appeal to the High Court,
which believed that the Sub-inspector’s “dying declaration” in which he
mentioned Dutta’s name was not sufficient evidence.152 The Intelligence
Branch nonetheless believed Dutta to be an “assassin” and argued for his
detention. In compiling his history sheet, the IB acknowledged that much
of its information against Dutta rested on a single, albeit highly
trusted, source:
The case against Premananda Dutta with respect to his revolutionary con-
spiracy before the murder of Sub-in Profulla Rai depend practically entirely
[sic] on the statement of one source, namely “X.Y.” but the information
given by this source has been corroborated so frequently and in so varied a
manner, that it can be accepted without hesitation.153
An India Office official emphasized that even if the veracity of some ele-
ments in history sheets might be in question, the aggregate information
could still justify police surveillance:
It is not necessary to claim that everything in statements is true. They are

simply collections of the information received from informers and from
other sources and tabulated against the persons mentioned by the Police
Intelligence Offices. If it were desired to prosecute any persons against
whom similar material existed, no doubt only a portion of the story as con-
tained here would be found suitable for production in Court. But the gen-
eral effect of the information from numerous sources leaves no doubt of the
propriety of maintaining a watch upon the persons whose history is given.154
The intelligence archive compiled on the nationalist leader Subhas

Chandra Bose illustrates the prominence of information derived from
informers and agents in the intelligence-gathering and analysis of the
Bengal Police IB. Bose vexed and alarmed colonial authorities from the
1920s until his death in a plane crash in 1945. Most famous for his leader-
ship of the Indian National Army, formed with Japanese assistance during
the Second World War, Bose was a prominent regional and later national
leader of the Indian National Congress (INC) during the 1920s and 1930s.
Throughout his political career, colonial authorities consistently suspected
him of involvement with revolutionary terrorists in Bengal. A 1932 intel-
ligence report referred to Jugantar, one of the two main revolutionary
organizations in Bengal, as “the fighting force of Subhas Chandra Bose.”155
As was the case for thousands of men and women believed to be con-
nected to the revolutionary movement, a history sheet was compiled for
Bose and amended over time. Bose’s 1924 sheet, compiled in support of
his detention without trial under Regulation III of 1818, illustrates the
IB’s dependence on informers as a source of political intelligence. The
information in Bose’s dossier was derived from ten different informers
associated with four different police officers and five intercepted letters,
supplemented by information from two Bengal districts and the Director
of the Intelligence Bureau in New Delhi, as well as “a notice published in
the newspapers.”156
Much of the information in the twenty-six page report came from
“K. G. S.,” an agent described as “extremely reliable.” K. G. S. told the
Bengal Police Intelligence Branch that Bose’s name had appeared on a list
in the pocket book of a revolutionary which listed sixty-four names of
“Important Members who may be given independent charge.” The same
revolutionary sent Bose a letter “requesting him to avoid all outward dem-
onstrations, as his arrest would seriously handicap the secret organiza-
tion.” Another revolutionary told K. G. S. how Bose was in touch with
overseas powers who would support armed revolution in India; the agent
added that Bose had “no faith that non-violent non-cooperation would
ever bring about Swaraj [independence].” K. G. S. also reported on “a
secret conference of revolutionists at which Subhas virtually presided” in
1923. The Intelligence Branch concluded, based on the reports of K. G.
S. and other agents, that Bose had “joined hands with the revolutionists
and that, at the present moment, he occupies an important part in their
councils.” In 1925, based on this history sheet, the IB described Bose as
“the leading organizer of the revolutionary movement in Bengal.”157
The Intelligence Branch attached particular importance to the fact that
that one of the names on the list of revolutionaries on which Bose appeared
was that of Gopi Nath Saha, who was executed for the murder in 1924 of
a European businessman named Ernest Day who was mistaken for Charles
Tegart. Indeed, the IB believed, largely based on the testimony of K. G.
S., that Bose was involved in various discussions regarding plans to assas-
sinate Tegart. The revolutionary Bepin Ganguly was said to have con-
verted Bose and other revolutionaries from a belief that the Governor of
Bengal should be assassinated prior to Tegart “on the ground that his
assassination would be appreciated by the bulk of the people,” as well as
remove the stigma of recent failed assassination and robbery attempts by
the revolutionaries. In April 1924, K. G. S. reported that Bose was in favor
106 M. SILVESTRI
of blowing up a train in which Tegart was traveling, and was prepared to

accept a heavy loss of life, including Indian passengers, if Tegart “could be
put out of the way.”158
The IB officer who compiled Bose’s history sheet acknowledged Bose’s
political talents, describing him as a “young man of considerable ability”
and a confidant of the Bengali nationalist leader C. R. Das. Yet other intel-
ligence reports were more negative, reflecting the bias against revolution-
aries which often crept into even relatively sophisticated analyses. In an IB
compilation of those detained without trial in 1924, Bose was listed in the
category of “irreconcilable.” The brief resume of Bose’s alleged revolu-
tionary career claimed that “even as a boy [he] displayed violent anti-
British sentiment,” neglecting the fact that he had sat for and passed the
entrance examinations for the Indian Civil Service in 1920.159 An analysis
in 1940 described him bluntly as “a political filibuster with the moral out-
look of an Al Capone.”160
Although intelligence officers took Bose’s clandestine leadership of
revolutionary organizations as a given, his biographers have stressed that
Bose’s actual connections with revolutionary groups were uncertain at
best. Leonard Gordon notes how not only intelligence officers but former
revolutionaries subsequently wove exaggerated tales of his revolutionary
activity.161 As Sugata Bose has recently observed, Bose, like his mentor
Das, “did not support acts of individual terrorism and did not believe
swaraj could be won by terrorist methods. Bred in the Bengali political
tradition, however, they did not subscribe unquestioningly to Gandhian
nonviolence either.”162 But although some informers cast doubt on Bose’s
commitment to the revolutionary movement—one source described him
as “purely a non-cooperator” who “had nothing to do with revolutionary
ideas”—these voices ultimately carried little weight in intelligence
assessments.163
The writing of history was an important element of the narratives that
both revolutionaries and colonial officials constructed about the revolu-
tionary movement in Bengal. In the 1920s, the first generation of revolu-
tionaries, who had been released under the 1919 amnesty, began to publish
memoirs and histories of the revolutionary movement. This first genera-
tion of accounts, according to Durba Ghosh, gave the revolutionary
movement “a storied past” and challenged narratives of both liberal politi-
cal reform and non-violence as the dominant form of Indian national-
ism.164 These revolutionary autobiographies and histories in turn became
sources for intelligence officers.165 The interest of the IB varied according
to the perceived veracity of the text and the insights it was seen to give into
the revolutionaries’ past and future behavior, as well as the degree to which
the work might inspire younger Bengalis to emulate previous revolution-
aries.166 Some published works seem to have been ignored by the IB, while
others, such as Hem Chandra Kanungo’s Banglaya Biplab Kahini (Account
of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal), considered to be a critical and
revealing history of the early revolutionaries, received extensive attention.
The Intelligence Branch translated Kanungo’s book into English and
printed twenty copies, with extensive annotations by the IB, for the use of
colonial officials.167
Prior to the Great War, Intelligence Branch officers had already begun
to pen their own histories of the Bengali revolutionaries. The first was
F. C. Daly’s Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal
(1911).168 Daly, who had headed the Special Branch from 1909 to 1911,
sought to undercover the roots of revolutionary organizations in Bengal,
which the Special Branch believed to have been in existence for two years
prior to the attempt to wreck the Governor of Bengal’s train in December
1907. Daly’s account was richly documented; indeed, approximately
three-quarters of the text was made up of supporting documentation,
including court judgments, exhibits, and confessions. He not only sought
to uncover and narrate the history of the revolutionaries, with the arrest
and trial of the Manicktolla group as the centerpiece of his story, but also
to offer advice and warnings about the future behavior of the revolution-
aries. Revolutionaries still sought to target colonial officials for assassina-
tion, he cautioned, but were not so ready “to sacrifice their own lives for
the sake of accomplishing a murder.” Forgery of notes and coins was being
considered by revolutionary leaders as a new funding source in addition to
dacoity. The revolutionaries, Daly concluded, had learned from their his-
tory, and intelligence officers would be well advised to do so as well:
“Police officers should bear in mind that the revolutionists are now acting
with extreme caution. It cannot be expected that a large party like the
Manicktolla party will ever again be discovered sitting over an arsenal of
guns, revolvers and explosives.”169
In the interwar era, the Intelligence Branch authored a series of reports
that sought to encapsulate the history of “Bengali terrorism.” The author
of many of the reports was the English intelligence officer R. E. A. Ray,
who entered the Indian Police in 1910 and served his entire career in
Bengal. Ray rose through police ranks to serve as both Deputy Inspector
General of the IB in the mid-1930s and again during the early years of the
108 M. SILVESTRI
Second World War. He concluded his career as Police Commissioner of

Calcutta (1943–1946). Ray displayed a facility with languages; educated
in Bolougne, he was fluent in French and studied German and Russian.
During his posting at an internment camp for Germans in northern Bengal
during the First World War, he learned Nepali and Tibetan as well.170 In
the 1920s and early 1930s he authored a series of detailed reports on the
revolutionary movement in Bengal which focused on both the history of
Bengal revolutionary organizations and local aspects of the movement.171
While Ray was far from sympathetic to the revolutionaries—he once
referred to revolutionaries as “murderous fanatics”—his reports also cred-
ited their determination, adaptability, and resourcefulness, and their suc-
cesses in recovering from colonial campaigns against them and recruiting
successive generations of followers.172
Ray and other intelligence officers were not oblivious to changes within
the organization and activities of the revolutionary groups, or the influ-
ences which helped to inspire their campaign against British colonial rule.
In 1933, he remarked on the revolutionaries’ increasingly secular tone,
noting that “elaborate ceremonies of initiation and of administration of
vows, before an image of the goddess Kali” had largely vanished, replaced
by the reading of “seditious” books and “instructions from persons who
have won [the recruits’] trust and confidence.”173 Yet an important theme
in the analyses of Ray and other intelligence officers was the essential con-
tinuity which they saw within the revolutionary movement. In 1931, Ray
noted that “the terrorists and sympathizers of the early days” had become
“the fathers of the present-day terrorists.”174 In an analysis the following
year entitled “Recruitment of Terrorists in Schools and Colleges,” he
tabulated a total of 375 “terrorist outrages” from 1907 until 2 May 1932,
and emphasized that
these outrages have been committed in pursuance of the same ideals which
have actuated the terrorists since 1907, that they have been committed by
members of terrorist groups which have grown from the original secret soci-
eties in Bengal, and that the policy of these terrorist groups has been dic-
tated by persons who were active terrorists in former terrorist campaigns
and were the disciples of the first teachers of terrorism in Bengal.175
Ray argued that an analysis of internments and convictions for “terrorist

crime” from the 1915 Defence of India Act onward “would show that
nearly all the detenus and convicts were school-boys or students at the
time of their recruitment and that many were school-boys or students at

the time of their arrest.” Ray also detected a similar pattern of “the exploi-
tation of all open organizations” across the history of the revolutionary
movement. What he termed the “insidious propaganda” from the nation-
alist press had rendered it unnecessary “to bind recruits by the most sol-
emn religious vows” as in the early days of the movement. Ray quoted
from a series of statements by those who confessed to involvement in revo-
lutionary activities over the previous decade to illustrate his point about
the prevalence of recruitment in schools and colleges.176
Intelligence analyses thus rendered the revolutionaries’ past actions leg-
ible and their future trajectory comprehensible to imperial authorities.
Writing in 1936 in response to reports of rising support for communism
among Bengali revolutionaries, Intelligence Bureau DIG and former
Bengal Police IB officer P. C. Bamford saw an essential continuity in the
three-decade-long history of the Bengali revolutionary movement. There
was no “change of heart” in the revolutionaries’ embrace of communism,
he argued, but rather “it is merely a matter of expediency.” Indeed,
Bamford saw the goal of Indian Communists—“a violent mass revolution
for which the people are to be quietly prepared”—as a primary object of
many revolutionaries, dating back to the foundation of the Dacca
Anushilan Samiti prior to the Great War. “I have no doubt that history will
repeat itself,” Bamford argued, “and that it will be impossible for Bengali
terrorists to maintain their ardour and at the same time refrain from overt
acts.” It was only the passage of time, Bamford concluded, not imprison-
ment or efforts of reform “that eliminates more active terrorists from the
ranks than anything else.”177
* * *
The painstaking analysis of R. E. A. Ray and other intelligence officers
were central to the use of special legislation and judicial proceedings.
These micro- and macro-level dissections of the actions and attitudes of
revolutionaries helped to establish the existence of revolutionary conspir-
acy, a precondition for the passage of such legislation to create lists of
revolutionary suspects who were subjected to detention without trial
under colonial legislation. These became the colonial’s state most impor-
tant strategies for suppressing “Bengali terrorism.” Ordinance I of 1924,
which became the following year the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Act (BCLAA), closely followed the language of the 1915 Defence of India
110 M. SILVESTRI
Act in allowing for arrest and detention without trial. Although the
BCLAA expired after five years, it was reinstated in 1930; again, first as an
ordinance followed by an act of legislation. Collectively, the Ordinances
and Criminal Law Amendment Acts allowed for the detention without
trial of thousands of suspected revolutionaries in the interwar period. The
Government of Bengal passed a further series of anti-terrorist legislation
in 1932 as the revolutionary campaign escalated.178
In this regard, the Intelligence Branch was successful in its campaign
against the Bengali revolutionaries. Yet this intense focus on the inner
workings of the revolutionary groups gave a rather myopic cast to police
intelligence. The IB consistently opposed carrying out surveillance and
intelligence analysis which they believed distracted from its main objective
of opposing the revolutionary movement in Bengal. In 1928, the
Government of Bengal requested the Intelligence Branch to use the local
DIB in order to gain “inside information” on communal unrest in
Kharagpur in Midnapore District, an important railway center. Intelligence
Branch officer L. H. Colson complained that he had “stretched a consid-
erable point” in lending an inspector to the investigation and the DIB’s
work had suffered as a result; it was “plainly the duty of the regular local
Police,” Colson maintained, “to know local conditions and where to get
such information.” Deputy Inspector General F. J. Lowman emphasized
that the DIBs were intended for “combating secret revolutionary con-
spiracy only.”179
Indian intelligence officers, well aware of their British superiors’ desire
for the IB to focus its energies on the revolutionaries, were reluctant to
devote much attention to the Indian National Congress. T. G. H. Holman
found that “the paragraph headed ‘Congress’ was invariably the most dull;
relegated to the end of every summary: a subject for the uniformed
branch.”180 This was in spite of the fact that the Intelligence Branch recog-
nized that there was significant interaction between the secret revolutionary
organizations and the Congress in Bengal. “The border line between open
and secret revolutionary organizations is narrow,” IB DIG J. C. Farmer
observed in 1931.181 Yet by this time, the emphatic focus of the IB on
“secret revolutionary conspiracy” was hampering the flow of intelligence.
In early 1930, the Deputy Inspector General of the Intelligence Branch had
sent a circular to all police superintendents in the province stressing the
need for close cooperation between the DIB and uniformed police in order
to combat the use of open organizations as “a cloak and recruiting ground”
for terrorism. Such cooperation, he lamented, was not taking place at all:
The Inspector General of Police has noticed that there is too often a regret-
table lack of liaison and cooperation between the DIB staff and the rest of
the District Force and, from this want of co-ordination, revolutionaries
derive much advantage and opportunity for the prosecution of their plans.
Too often the uniformed Branch appear to think that they have no respon-
sibility for, nor interest in, the work of the DIB staff. Such an attitude is not
only mischievous and wrong, it is positively dangerous to all Police Officers.
The cult of revolution is too widespread nowadays among the rising gen-
eration for it to be possible that the mere handful of officers and men
employed in the DIB should be able to exercise effective watch and control
over it.182
The message circulated only a month before Mohandas Gandhi’s salt

march which marked the beginning of the Congress civil disobedience
campaign, and two months prior to the Chittagong Armoury Raid. In
spite of its elaborate analyses and genealogies of “Bengali terrorism,” the
IB was still a narrowly focused organization and one that had isolated itself
from many currents in colonial society. A renewed revolutionary offensive
in the early 1930s was to reveal the weaknesses of police intelligence in
Bengal, and require the use of new strategies in an effort to maintain colo-
nial control. The following chapter will explore these issues.

London
CS Chief Secretary
University
112 M. SILVESTRI
IO India Office
London
Pol Political
Sec. Secretary
Bengal, 1995)
Notes
1. Extracts from Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, GOI,
17 December 1931, L/P&J/12/391, APAC BL.
2. R. E. A. Ray, “Report on the Jugantar Party of Dinajpur District,” (1932)
in TIB II: 1028–1029.
3. Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949
(London: Bloomsbury, 2010), xiv.
4. Although the distinction between intelligence-gathering and analysis is
often an artificial one, it is useful to delineate both the structures and
practices of colonial intelligence-gathering. Peter Gill and Mark Phythian,
Intelligence in an Insecure World (2nd ed. Cambridge and Malden, MA:
Polity Press, 2012), 15.
5. Gill and Phythian, Intelligence, 40–42.
6. David Dery, “‘Papereality’ and Learning in Bureaucratic Organizations,”
Administration & Society 29: 6 (1998), 677–689. On the volume of
colonial record-keeping see C. A. Bayly, “Knowing the Country: Empire
and Information in India,” Modern Asian Studies 27: 1 (1993), 38–41;
and Robert Bickers, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai
(New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2003), 55.
7. Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest
in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge
8. Erin M. Giuliani, “Strangers in the Village? Colonial Policing in Rural

Bengal, 1861–1892,” Modern Asian Studies 49: 5 (2015), 1378–1404.
9. Radhika Singha, “Punished by Surveillance: Policing ‘Dangerousness’ in
Colonial India, 1872–1918,” Modern Asian Studies 49: 2 (2015),
241–269.
10. Draft Special Department Circular, attachment to letter of 13 November
1911 from Special Dept. to C. J. Stevenson-Moore, CS to GOB, GOB
Home (Pol) Conf. No. 34 of 1912 (8–10), WBSA.
11. See Chap. 2.
12. Georgina Sinclair, “‘The Sharp Edge of the Intelligence Machine’: The
Rise of the Malayan Police Special Branch 1948–1955,” Intelligence and
National Security 26: 4 (2011), 460–477 (quotation on 460).
13. Rory Cormac, “Organizing Intelligence: An Introduction to the 1955
Report on Colonial Security,” Intelligence and National Security 25: 6
(2010), 800–822; and Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security
Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008), 300.
65 and 71–72, L/S&G/7/231, APAC BL.
15. Twynam and Ray, Central and District Intelligence Branches, 67–69.
16. Twynam and Ray, Central and District Intelligence Branches, 12 and
18–19.
17. J. H. Kerr, CS to GOB, to Sec. to GOI, Home, 13 March 1917,
L/P&J/6/1610, APAC BL.
18. Draft Special Department Circular, attachment to letter of 13 November
1911 from Special Dept. to C. J. Stevenson-Moore, CS to GOB, GOB
Home (Pol) Conf. No. 34 of 1912 (8–10), WBSA.
19. IB Circular No. 11, 5 November 1912, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 34
of 1912 (8–10), WBSA. Later in the twentieth century, for example,
jatra performances contained Marxist content such as dramatizations of
episodes from the life of V. I. Lenin. Ralph Yarrow, Indian Theatre:
Theatre of Origin, Theatre of Freedom (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001),
84. As early as 1910, the Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam con-
sidered jatras worthy of police surveillance, an order that the Intelligence
Branch re-circulated to all districts in 1913. IB Circular No. 7 of 1913,
19 April 1913, GOB IB No. 517 of 1913, WBSA.
20. J. H. Kerr, CS to GOB, to Sec. to GOI, Home, 13 March 1917,
21. J. H. Kerr to Home, GOI, 19 May 1917, GOI Home (Police) A, July
1917, Nos. 132–136, APAC BL. Another copy is located at: J. H. Kerr,
114 M. SILVESTRI
CS to GOB, to Sec. to GOI, Home Dept., 13 March 1917,

22. Other provinces established District Intelligence Branches following the
Great War. It was not until the late 1920s when Madras stationed
Intelligence Branch Sub-inspectors in “the more important districts,” a
measure ultimately eventually to all Madras districts. E. H. Colebrooke,
“Intelligence – Madras,” Colebrooke Papers, MSS Eur. D 789, APAC
BL.
23. Circular letter from C. W. C. Plowden, 20 October 1917, GOB IB No.
697 of 1927, WBSA.
24. Group I included Dacca, Mymensingh, Noakhali, Chittagong, Tippera,
Bakarganj, and Faridpur. “Rules for the working of the District
Intelligence Branches” [1917], GOB IB No. 697 of 1927, WBSA.
25. Circular letter from C. W. C. Plowden, 20 October 1917, GOB IB No.
697 of 1927, WBSA.
26. J. H. Kerr, CS to GOB, to Sec. to Home GOI [February 1919],
27. Twynam and Ray, Central and District Intelligence Branches, 16.
28. Dery, “‘Papereality’ and Learning.” For a similar focus on “representa-
tion in words” over things and events in other aspects of police work in
colonial India, see Radha Kumar, “Policing Everyday Life in the Tamil
Countryside, c. 1900–1950,” Indian Economic and Social History Review
54: 3 (2017), 362.
29. Mark Doyle, Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the
Pax (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 138 and 153–154.
of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Berkeley and London:
University of California Press, 2008), 59 and 97.
32. Daniel Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism
and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017), 40.
33. Daniel Brückenhaus, “Every Stranger Must be Suspected: Trust
Relationships and the Surveillance of Anti-Colonialists in Early Twentieth-
Century Western Europe,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36: 4 (2010), 523–
566; and Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal,
1875–1927 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 183.
34. S. G. Taylor, “Tale of Mafizuddin,” Taylor Papers, MSS Eur. C 362,
APAC BL.
35. Tegart memoir, 98.
TIB I: 805–806.
37. In 1931, for example, the son of a police sub-inspector numbered among
four college students in Rangpur in northern Bengal recruited by revolu-
tionaries. R. E. A. Ray, “Report on the Jugantar Party of Dinajpur
District,” (1932) in TIB II: 1020.
38. Durba Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in the Interwar
Years,” in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring Empire:
Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Delhi: Orient Longman,
2006), 270–292.
39. Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s
Global Struggle against Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2011), 187.
40. Although the Government of Bengal took no action against the Bengalee,
the Inspector General, C. W. C. Plowden, feared that the publication
would warn revolutionary dacoits about the information which the police
possessed. GOI Home (Pol) Deposit No. 41, January 1915, NAI.
41. Commissioner, Rajshahi Division, to CS to GOB, 5 December 1932,
GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 1046 (1–5) of 1932, WBSA.
43. S. G. Taylor to Cyril Grassby, SP, Dacca, 23 July 1934, Taylor Papers,
CSAS.
44. Armstrong added that “the ordinary thana police is naturally not aware
of all revolutionary connections in the thana jurisdiction and the District
Intelligence Branch is the only agency in a position to report on this
aspect of the matter.” In Mymensingh District in 1925, for example,
seven candidates for the position of Sub-inspector were identified by the
local DIB as having been current or former members of revolutionary
organizations. One was a former member of the Anushilan Party who had
turned police informer. He was not recommended for police service, but
was told that he could seek a post in some other government department.
Armstrong to IG, 31 August 1925, and DIB Mymensingh to R. E.
A. Ray, IB, 10 October 1925, GOB IB No. 381 of 1925, WBSA.
45. Stanley Jackson to Lord Willingdon, Viceroy, 13 October 1931, GOI
Home (Pol) No. 4/35 of 1931, NAI.
46. P. E. S. Finney, “Notes for the Additional Superintendent Headquarters.
Mymensingh. March, 1936,” 8. Finney Papers, CSAS; and T. G.
H. Holman memoir, 181, Holman Papers, MSS Eur. D 884, APAC BL.
47. R. E. A. Ray, “Review of Revolutionary Matters for the Week Ending
13th June 1940,” 97, L/P&J/12/401, APAC BL.
48. Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 2.
49. Emphasis in original. Notes by R. E. A. Ray on draft of To Guard My People,
Ch. 18, p. 84, Indian Police Collection, MSS Eur. F 161/257, APAC
BL.
116 M. SILVESTRI
50. Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in
India 1900–1910 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Amiya
K. Samanta, ed., Alipore Bomb Trial 1908–1910: A Compilation of
Unpublished Documents (Kolkata and London: Frontpage, 2017).
51. “Introduction,” in Samanta, ed., Alipore Bomb Trial, 101–121.
53. Prosecution Witness 42, Radha Gobinda Kundu (40 Years), Inspector of
Police, 15 December 1908, in Samanta, ed., Alipore Bomb Trial, 489.
54. Note by H. A. Stuart and H. Adamson, 7 July 1909, GOI Home (Pol)
Proceedings. A (January 1911), No. 52–64, microfilm, APAC BL.
55. Quoted in Heehs, Bomb in Bengal, 227. Heehs refers to Alam as “the
mainstay of the prosecution.”
56. See Samanta, ed., Alipore Bomb Trial, 465–466. According to Amiya
K. Samanta, while the Bengal Police IB had eliminated “blatant distor-
tions” of evidence in the latter stages of the revolutionary campaign, “the
Government’s tacit support to minor manipulations was not lacking.”
Samanta, “Preface,” in TIB I: viii–ix.
57. Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo: A Biography (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008), 202.
58. DIG Police to Moulvi Badri Alum Saheb, 25 January 1910, GOB IB No.
1065 of 1910, WBSA.
59. “I came back from Barrackpore on Monday evening to hear that the
Police Inspector Shams-ul-Alam had just been shot, and with the gloom
of his assassination hanging over everyone had to look after arrangements
in the new Council Room and the completion of my speech for the open-
ing ceremony.” Lord Minto to John Morley, 27 January 1910, Minto
Papers, MS 12740, NLS; and Minto to Col. Sir Arthur Bigge, Private
Sec. to HRH the Prince of Wales, 7 March 1910, MS 12776, NLS.
61. Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 1–3. For a discussion of the term
“bhadralok,” see Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism
and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), pp. 3–17.
62. Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 271–272.
63. G. R. Savage, “The Punjab CID,” Indian Police Collection, MSS Eur. F
161/210, APAC BL.
64. P. E. S. Finney memoir, Ch. 22, p. 3, Photo Eur. 272, APAC BL.
65. The use of Military Intelligence Officers and the use of British and
Indian Army personnel in the anti-terrorist campaign will be discussed in
Chap. 4.
66. John Hunt, Life is Meeting (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978), 23.
67. One Muslim intelligence officer, Sadat Ali Akhand, recorded his unease at
being a Muslim officer in the bhadralok-dominated subordinate ranks of
the IB. See his Tero Nambar Lord Sinha Road [Number 13 Lord Sinha
Road] (Reprint Calcutta: Mitra and Ghose, 1985). Muslims totaled
thirty-one percent of Bengal Police officers in 1920 and thirty-seven per-
cent two decades later. See the Bengal Police Annual Administration
Report for 1920 and 1940.
68. Note by IG, 3 July 1930, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 581 of 1930,
WBSA.
69. Note by H. Williamson, 4 May 1932, GOI Home (Pol) No. 4/25 of
1932, NAI.
70. Notes by R. E. A. Ray on draft of To Guard My People, Ch. 22, pp. 84–85,
Indian Police Collection, MSS Eur. F161/257, APAC BL.
72. R. B. Hughes-Buller, IG, to J. H. Kerr, 2 February 1916, GOB Home
73. R. B. Hughes-Buller, IG, to CS to GOB, 21 February 1916, GOB Home
(Pol) Conf. No. 226 (1–2) of 1916, WBSA.
74. R. B. Hughes-Buller, IG, to J. H. Kerr, 2 February 1916, GOB Home
75. R. B. Hughes-Buller, IG, to CS to GOB, 21 February 1916, GOB Home
(Pol) Conf. No. 226 (1–2) of 1916, WBSA.
76. Tegart memoir, 124. Tegart was reported to have screamed and wept at
the death of Chatterjee. M. L. Bhattacharya, Calcutta, to G. C. Dutt,
Deputy Director, Intelligence Bureau, Government of India, New Delhi,
9 January 1965. I am grateful to the late Sabyasachi Mukherjee, formerly
of the Calcutta Police, for providing me with a copy of this letter.
77. J. C. Curry, Tegart of the Indian Police (Tunbridge Wells, Kent: The
Courier Co., 1960), 12–13. Tegart’s wife Kathleen concluded that
“Chatterjee in particular was a wise and fine man, instinctively respected
and liked by his fellow officers, who listened with much attention to his
opinions,” and who was “instrumental in making good citizens out of a
large number of the young men who came before them.” Tegart memoir,
57.
78. Richard J. Popplewell writes, “By now, the Intelligence Branch was a very
different body from the inexperienced and untrustworthy CIDs which
had confronted the revolutionary movement in its early stages. It was an
elite body with a strong esprit de corps. Many of its members displayed a
high degree of courage.” Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial
Defence: British Intelligence and the Defense of the Indian Empire, 1904–
1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 209.
118 M. SILVESTRI
79. Kathleen Tegart reports that none of the officers left the Intelligence
Branch while J. C. Curry reports that almost none of them did. Tegart
memoir, 125; and Curry, Tegart, 13.
80. Kahsaday Ghosal to Charles Tegart, 2 January 1939, Tegart Papers, Box
4, File 2B, Middle East Study Centre Archive, St. Antony’s College,
Oxford.
81. “Notes of a conference between the Chief Secretary, Hughes-Buller and
R. Clarke, Police Commissioner, Calcutta.” 7 February 1916, GOB
82. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 30 March 1917.
83. Statistics are taken from J. C. Nixon, “Notes on Outrages. Compiled in
1917,” (1917) in TIB VI.
84. Notes by R. E. A. Ray on draft of To Guard My People, Ch. 22, p. 11,
85. Criminal Intelligence Office note, 30 January 1920, GOI Home (Police)
Deposit No. 16 of 1920, NAI.
86. GOB IB No. 101 of 1921, WBSA. For a more detailed discussion of
police militancy in Bengal during this time, see Michael Silvestri, “‘A
Fanatical Reverence for Gandhi’: Nationalism and Police Militancy in
Bengal during the Non-cooperation Movement,” Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History 45: 6 (2017), 969–997.
87. G. W. Dixon, DIG, IB, “Note on the Attitude of the Police Towards the
Non-co-operation Movement,” 11 April 1921, GOB IB No. 101 of
1921, WBSA.
88. British Police Conference, 2nd Session, Bengal (Howrah.) December 1921.
Address Delivered by Rai Saheb Purna Chandra Biswas, B.A., President,
p. 7. No. 622 of 1922, L/P&J/6/1789, APAC BL.
89. “Judgment: Emperor versus Jitendra Nath Gupta and others,” (1935),
p. 157, L/P&J/7/612, APAC BL.
90. H. W. Hale, Terrorism in India 1917–1936 (1937; reprint Delhi: Deep,
1974), 53–55.
91. P. E. S. Finney, Just My Luck: Memoirs of a Police Officer of the Raj (Dhaka:
The University Press, 2002), 192.
92. Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 66.
93. See Chap. 1.
94. These included crime registers, conviction registers and history sheets.
Singha, “Punished by Surveillance,” 259.
95. Singha, “Punished by Surveillance,” 245.
96. Shahid Amin, “Approver’s Testimony, Judicial Discourse: The Case of
Chauri Chaura,” in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies V (Delhi: Oxford
97. Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-
century India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 15.
98. Notes by R. E. A. Ray on draft of To Guard My People, Ch. 22, p. 13,
99. For the importance of approvers in establishing conspiracy, see Amin,
“Approver’s Testimony, Judicial Discourse,” 178–189.
100. C. E. S. Fairweather, “Report on the Work of the Central and District
Intelligence Branches for the Three Years 1930, 1931 and 1932,” p. 3,
10 March 1993, L/P&J/12/466, APAC BL.
10 March 1933, L/P&J/12/466, APAC BL.
102. Memo on policy towards detenus in Bengal [1927], Tegart Papers, Box
2, CSAS.
103. Note by Sir Horace Williamson, 4 May 1932, GOI Home (Pol) No.
4/25 of 1932, NAI.
105. P. E. S. Finney, “Just My Luck, or Reminiscences,” Ch. 10, p. 1, Finney
Collection, Photo Eur. 272, APAC BL.
106. Twynam and Ray, Central and District Intelligence Branches, 18; and
Holman memoir, 277.
107. Holman memoir, 376.
Collection, Photo Eur. 272, APAC BL.
110. Vaidik cites the case of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association
member Hans Raj, whom the news that the revolutionary leader Sukhdev
had given a statement to the police, prompted a sense of betrayal which
led him to make his own confession. Raj claimed that “Even while giving
evidence, I tried to do the least harm.” Aparna Vaidik, “History of a
Renegade Revolutionary: Revolutionism and Betrayal in Colonial India,”
Postcolonial Studies 16: 2 (2013), 219 and 222.
111. Cited in Vaidik, “History of a Renegade Revolutionary,” 222.
112. “Activities of the Revolutionaries in Bengal from the 1st September 1924
to the 31st March 1925,” (1925) in TIB I: 430–433.
113. “Activities of the Revolutionaries in Bengal from the 1st September 1924
to the 31st March 1925,” (1925) in TIB I: 383–384 and 430–442.
114. The colonial response to the Chittagong Armoury Raid is the subject of
Chap. 4.
115. Manini Chatterjee, Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930–1934
(Delhi: Penguin, 1999), 164–170.
116. Chatterjee, Do and Die, 184.
120 M. SILVESTRI

118. Tegart related the story of discovering “the body of a man who had been
believed guilty of giving information to the police had been found thrown
on waste ground, his body mutilated and his face terribly burnt with
acid.” Tegart memoir, 171–172.
119. Tegart memoir, 1–2.
120. “I thought, ‘This is the life for me. I shall be riding round on my horse
with my revolver dealing with terrorists.’” P. E. S. Finney memoir, Chap.
1, p. 2. Photo Eur. 272, APAC BL.
121. Jordanna Bailkin, “The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible
in British India?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48: 2 (2006),
462–493; Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck, eds., Violence,
Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018); Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India:
White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010); Jock McCulloch, “Empire and Violence, 1900–1939,” in
Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 220–239; Gavin Rand, “‘Martial Races’ and
‘Imperial Subjects’: Violence and Governance in Colonial India, 1857–
1914,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’Histoire 13: 1
(2006), 1–20; and Kim A. Wagner, “Savage Warfare: Violence and the
Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency,” History
Workshop Journal 85 (2018), 217–237.
122. David A. Campion, “Authority, Accountability and Representation: The
United Provinces Police and the Dilemmas of the Colonial Policeman in
British India, 1902–1939,” Historical Research 76: 192 (2003),
228–229.
123. Douglas M. Peers, “Torture, the Police, and the Colonial State in the
Madras Presidency, 1816–1855,” Criminal Justice History 12 (1991),
29–56; and Anupama Rao, “Problems of Violence, States of Terror:
Torture in Colonial India,” Interventions 3: 2 (2001), 186–205.
124. Deana Heath, “Bureaucracy, Power and Violence in Colonial India: The
Role of Indian Subalterns,” in Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons,
eds., Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to
the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016),
364–390.
125. P. E. S. Finney memoir, “Just My Life or Reminiscences,” Ch. 8, p. 1,
Finney Papers. MSS D 1041/4, APAC BL.
126. For a rare admission of torture by European members of the police, see
Ian Tyrrell, From England to the Antipodes and India—1846–1902
(Madras: Thompson & Co., 1902), 86. Tyrrell related the remarks of a
former Bombay police inspector named Hallnan, who told him “what
capital places the Police stations in Bombay were, as aid to the Police, for,
prisoners could be tortured without anyone outside knowing anything of
the matter.”
127. Heath, “Bureaucracy, Power and Violence,” 379.
128. Jeanne Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline
and the Politics of Deflection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
130. One law lecturer held in custody in 1910 for his alleged connections to
revolutionaries detailed his days of questioning by Indian and British
police officers. An Indian inspector interrogated him for hours, while a
European or Anglo-Indian police inspector named Frizoni alternated
between questioning him “coaxingly” and “sometimes very rudely in a
threatening manner,” telling him, “‘You will be hanged without trial….
They would deport you first and hang you next.’” Lastly, Tegart and
Denham alternated interrogating him individually. “Sometimes they held
out threats and sometime inducements, always asking me if I could not
help myself out of my situation.” “Statement of Babu Lalit Mohan
Chatterjee made to his Pleader, dated the 31st of July 1910,” Minto
Papers, MS 12632, NLS. While Ananta Lal Singh was subjected to days
of intensive questioning when he surrendered to the IB in 1930, he was
treated with courtesy and held in a cell normally reserved for European
prisoners. Chatterjee, Do and Die, 166.
131. Bart Moore-Gilbert, The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family
Secrets (London and New York: Verso, 2014), 208–209.
132. David M. Anderson, “British Abuse and Torture in Kenya’ Counter-
insurgency, 1952–1960,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 23: 4–5 (2012),
700–719; and Mandy Blanton, “Destroy? ‘Migrate’? Conceal? British
Strategies for the Disposal of Sensitive Records of Colonial Administrations
at Independence,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40: 2
(2012), 321–335.
133. Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest, 378.
134. Caroline Elkins, “Looking Beyond Mau Mau: Archiving Violence in the
Era of Decolonization,” American Historical Review 120: 3 (2015),
852–868.
135. Zareer Masani, Indian Tales from the Raj (London: BBC Books, 1987),
115.
136. Durba Ghosh, “Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal,
1930 to the 1980s,” Gender & History 25: 2 (2013), 365.
137. Ujjwal Kumar Singh, Political Prisoners in India (London: SOAS, 1998).
138. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London:
122 M. SILVESTRI
139. C. J. Stevenson-Moore and Sir Benode Chandra Mitter to CS to GOB, 6

June 1918, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 116-C (1–26) of 1918, WBSA.
140. Tegart was in fact Irish. C. J. Stevenson-Moore and Sir Benode Chandra
Mitter to CS to GOB, 6 June 1918, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 116-C
(1–26) of 1918, WBSA.
141. GOB Fortnightly Report for the Second Half of August 1931, p. 1;
142. Haripada Bhattacharya, “Murder of Ahsanullah,” in I. Mallikarjuna
Sharma, ed., Easter Rebellion in India: The Chittagong Uprising
(Hyderabad: Marxist Study Forum, 1993), 238–244. One of the
Chittagong Armoury Raiders, Subodh Roy, recalled that the police first
interrogated him in “sweet words,” but severely beat him after he failed
to respond to their questioning. In contrast, Benode Behari Dutta, who
was not apprehended until 1941, stated that the police treated him with
great kindness and begged him not to order the assassination of the Sub-
inspector who arrested him, saying that “he was only discharging his law-
ful duty and cherished no ill-will towards me.” “Subodh Roy” and
“Benode Behari Dutta,” in Sharma, ed., Easter Rebellion in India, 74 and
135.
143. Masani, Indian Tales, 113 and 115.
144. C. A. Tegart to H. L. Stephenson, Additional Sec. to GOB, 30 April
1918, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 116-C (1–26) of 1918, WBSA.
145. Indian Police Collection, MSS Eur. 161/247, APAC BL. Cited in Patrick
French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division
(London: HarperCollins, 1997), 15.
146. C. J. Stevenson-Moore and Sir Benode Chandra Mitter to CS to GOB, 6
June 1918, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 116-C (1–26) of 1918, WBSA.
147. M. N. Roy, M. N. Roy’s Memoirs (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1964), 38.
148. Partha Chatterjee: The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice
of Power (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), 276.
149. Amiya K. Samanta, former director of the Intelligence Branch of West
Bengal, observed “that the I.B. had a good deal of accurate information
about the underground organizations cannot be denied; but to credit it
with the total knowledge about the underground organizations is an
untenable overestimation.” Amiya K. Samanta, “Preface,” in TIB I: iv–v.
150. For the problems of interpreting the testimony of “approvers” see
Wagner, Thuggee, 16–17; and Amin, “Approvers’ Testimony, Judicial
Discourse.”
151. This was the experience of Timothy Garton Ash, when he examined his
intelligence file maintained by the Stasi. Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A
Personal History (New York: Vintage, 1997), 29–30.
152. High Court Judgment, 12 February 1925, The Emperor v. Premananda

Dutta, accused, p. 12, L/P&J/6/1881, APAC BL.
153. The IB noted that another revolutionary, Ananta Singh, was also arrested
on XY’s information, which also established the connection between
Jasoda Pal and Satyen De and led to recovery of one of Mauser pistols
stolen from Rodda in 1914. “History Sheet of Premananda Dutta,” 16
August 1924, L/P&J/6/1881, APAC BL.
154. J. W. Hose to Undersec. of State, 16 June 1924, L/P&J/12/214, APAC
BL.
(1932) in TIB I: 748.
156. J. E. Armstrong, DIG, Bengal Police IB, “History Sheet of Subhas
Chandra Basu,” 30 April 1924, L/P&J/12/214, APAC BL. Unless oth-
erwise stated, the statements regarding Bose in the following paragraphs
are taken from this history sheet.
157. “Statement of Persons Arrested and Detained under (1) Regulation III of
1818, (2) BCLA Ordinance, 1924, (3) BCLA Act,
1925.”—“Irreconcilables,” Lytton Collection, MSS Eur. F 160/37,
APAC BL.
158. Bose was also accused of providing “shelter and money” to the Calcutta-
based leaders of Jugantar known as “Santosh Mitra’s gang.” Colonial
authorities implicated this faction of Jugantar in a series of dacoities and
several assassination attempts, including the failed attempt on the life of
Charles Tegart in January 1924. After Santosh Mitra’s arrest in August of
that year, gang members were “encouraged by him [Subhas] in their
murder plots.” “Notes on Santosh Mitra’s Gang,” [1926], Lytton
Collection, MSS Eur. F 160/37, APAC BL.
159. The report went on to note that Bose “was in close communication with
revolutionists and Bolsheviks abroad. Was deeply concerned in the con-
spiracies to assassinate police officers, to bomb the Council Chamber, and
to smuggle arms into India.” “Statement of Persons Arrested and
Detained under (1) Regulation III of 1818, (2) BCLA Ordinance, 1924,
(3) BCLA Act, 1925.”—“Irreconcilables,” Lytton Collection, MSS Eur.
F 160/37, APAC BL.
160. “Note on the Policy and Activities of the Terrorist Parties in Bengal from
1937 to August 1939,” (1940) in TIB I: 761.
161. Gordon writes, “Government agents were constantly investigating this
connection and compiling their findings and fantasies for the files of the
Home Department. Furthermore, many old revolutionaries verbally and
in print have told of their work with Subhas Bose. Some undoubtedly
worked with him; others seem to have woven elaborate webs of connec-
tion on the basis of a scanty thread.” Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers
124 M. SILVESTRI
Against the Raj: A Biography of Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New
York: Viking Penguin, 1999), 194.
162. Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent, 55.
163. J. E. Armstrong, DIG IB, “History Sheet of Subhas Chandra Basu,” 30
April 1924, L/P&J/12/214, APAC BL.
164. Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 24 and 90.
165. The Charles Tegart papers in the Centre of South Asian Studies at the
University of Cambridge contain a copy of Hemanta K. Sarkar,
Revolutionaries of Bengal: Their Methods and Ideals (Calcutta: Indian
Book Club, 1923), with annotation marks by Tegart. Tegart Papers, Box
2, File 10, CSAS.
166. Thus, the IB was familiar with a number of revolutionary memoirs pub-
lished during the 1920s. For example, an intelligence officer wrote of
Sachindra Nath Sanyal’s Bandi Jiban (1922) that “it gave an account of
the terrorist movement in such a way as to arouse the immature minds to
similar actions.” Amiya K. Samanta, “Preface” in Hem Chandra Kanungo,
Account of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal, ed. Amiya K. Samanta
(Kolkata and Delhi: Setu Prakashani, 2015), ii.
167. Amiya K. Samanta notes that Kanungo’s Marxist perspective made his
memoir different from others of the genre, and “the sharpness of all per-
vasive criticism” of the revolutionaries “attracted the attention of the
intelligence analysts and policy planners.” Kanungo, Account of the
Revolutionary Movement, iii.
168. F. C. Daly’s “Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in
Bengal” (1911) is reprinted in TIB I: 1–216.
169. Daly, “Revolutionary Movement in Bengal,” in TIB I: 45–46.
170. “Marion”: The Life and Diaries of Marion Ray, ed. A. G. Ray, C. T.
A. Ray and E. M. M. Ingpen, 82. I am grateful to Jeremy Ingpen for
providing me with excerpts from this unpublished work.
171. Numerous reports authored by Ray appear in Volume I and Volume II of
the Terrorism in Bengal compilation.
(1932) in TIB I: 747.
173. R. E. A. Ray, “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal
1905–1933,” (1933) in TIB I: 824.
174. R. E. A. Ray, “Report on the Activities of Terrorists in Bengal During the
Period April to December 1930,” (1931) in TIB I: 605.
175. R. E. A. Ray, “Recruitment of Terrorists in Schools and Colleges,” 2,
May 1932, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 404 of 1932, WBSA.
176. R. E. A. Ray, “Recruitment of Terrorists in Schools and Colleges,” 3–4,
9–11, May 1932, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 404 of 1932, WBSA.
177. Note by P. C. Bamford, DIG, Intelligence Bureau, 25 January 1936,

GOI Home (Poll) No. 45/6 of 1936, NAI.
178. Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 160–169.
179. L. H. Colson to IG, 3 October and 28 September 1930; and F. J.
Lowman, DIG, to J. R. Johnson, SP, DIB Mymensingh, 15 December
1928; GOB IB No. 697 of 1927, WBSA.
180. Holman memoir, 276.
181. J. C. Farmer, DIG, IB, to DIG, Burdwan Range, 12 January 1931, GOB
IB No. 697 of 1927, WBSA.
182. IB Circular No. 1 of 1930, 15 February 1930, GOB IB No. 697 of 1927,
WBSA.
CHAPTER 4
Intelligence Failures, Militarization,

and Rehabilitation: The Anti-Terrorist
Campaign After the Chittagong
Armoury Raid
Mohandas Gandhi’s Salt March of March 1930 began the second major
cycle of nationalist civil disobedience in interwar India. The campaign was
to last for almost four years and produced the arresting and, to imperial-
ists, unsettling image of Gandhi, in Winston Churchill’s words, “striding
half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace” in early 1931. Equally
disturbing to imperial authorities was the upsurge in revolutionary antico-
lonial activity that took place during these years. The prosecution of Indian
and British labor activists and revolutionaries in the Meerut Conspiracy
Case (1929–1933), at the time the most expensive legal case in British
imperial history, illustrated the transnational threat that imperialists
believed that communism posed to the British Empire.1 In April 1929,
two members of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, Bhagat
Singh and B. K. Dutt, were arrested for disrupting the Central Legislative
Assembly by throwing two non-lethal bombs, firing pistols, and distribut-
ing propaganda leaflets. The execution of Bhagat Singh for his role in the
Lahore Conspiracy Case made him into a nationalist martyr and a house-
hold name in India.2 In all, the Intelligence Bureau of the Government of
India recorded violent anticolonial activity in nine Indian provinces,
stretching from the Sindh to Burma, in 1930.3 Following an assassination
attempt against the Governor of Punjab in December 1930, the Director
of the Intelligence Bureau gloomily reflected that “at the close of the year,
it is unfortunately beyond all doubt that the twin shadows of violence and
terrorism are steadily lengthening and deepening over the land.”4

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_4
128 M. SILVESTRI
In Bengal, one event stood above all others in terms of revolutionary

activity: the Chittagong Armoury Raid of 18 April 1930. At around
10:30 in the evening, three groups of Jugantar party revolutionaries car-
ried out a coordinated attack on security and communications installations
in the port of Chittagong in eastern Bengal. The revolutionaries set fire to
the Police and Auxiliary Force armories and the telephone office, while
two other groups of insurgents cut telegraph wires, derailed a train, and
attempted to derail another at locales forty and seventy miles from
Chittagong, respectively.5
Although the revolutionaries retreated into the hills around Chittagong
a few hours later, the night’s events represented only the beginning of the
raid’s impact in Bengal. Colonial authorities were fortunate that the revo-
lutionaries failed to achieve some of their critical objectives. Although they
seized rifles and Lewis guns from the Auxiliary Force Armoury, they were
unaware that the ammunition for the rifles and machine guns was stored
elsewhere, rendering a potentially powerful insurgent arsenal useless.6 A
British captain who had attempted to confront the revolutionaries that
night wrote that “had they been armed with 0.303 rifles and ammunition
nothing could have prevented their occupying Chittagong and terrorizing
the whole district.”7
While noting the revolutionaries’ mistakes, the Bengal Police
Intelligence Branch (IB) also, in somewhat ominous tones, acknowledged
their achievements. In R. E. A. Ray’s judgment, “in the Chittagong raid
Bengal terrorists reached a standard of organization and daring of concep-
tion and execution never previously attained.”8 In particular, the IB noted
the thoroughness of the revolutionaries’ months of preparations for the
uprising. Ray acknowledged that “the mobilization scheme was so well
thought out” that when two of the raid’s leaders, “alarmed by indications
that the police were mediating some action against them, decided to make
their attempt earlier than they had originally planned, they were able to
collect their force in one day, detail the various batches under leaders and
proceed to the attack only one hour later than their scheduled time.”9 The
raid, “the first of its kind” among the Bengali revolutionaries, Ray con-
cluded “was very nearly successful.”10
The Chittagong Armoury Raid illustrated the evolving capacity of the
Bengali revolutionaries to challenge the colonial state. Not only was the
Bengal Police Intelligence Branch unable to prevent the raid, but colonial
authorities were unable to capture many of the raiders for years afterward.
The leader and organizer, Surjya Sen, was not apprehended until February
4 INTELLIGENCE FAILURES, MILITARIZATION, AND REHABILITATION… 129
1933. (He was executed the following year.) Former Bengal Chief
Secretary Robert Reid estimated that the six years it took to bring the
revolutionary campaign “fully under control” cost over £1.5 million.11
The difficulties faced by colonial authorities in Bengal were undoubt-
edly compounded by a groundswell of support for the revolutionaries
among Bengali Hindus, and the intersection of revolutionary activity dur-
ing the first half of the 1930s with the civil disobedience campaign of the
Indian National Congress.12 Yet at the root of the ineffectiveness of colo-
nial efforts to bring the Bengali revolutionary movement under control
was a massive failure of police intelligence. Although police intelligence
officers often attributed the failure to lack of personnel and need for more
extensive emergency legislation allowing detention without trial, the revo-
lutionary offensive that followed the Chittagong Armoury Raid laid bare
the structural problems of police intelligence in Bengal and their inability
to penetrate revolutionary networks.
This chapter will examine the reasons for these intelligence failures and
how colonial authorities attempted to remedy these deficiencies in the face
of the renewed revolutionary offensive that followed the Chittagong
Armoury Raid. These efforts further accentuated the coercive element of
the colonial anti-terrorist campaign in Bengal, as the number of revolu-
tionary suspects detained without trial and the militarization of policing
both increased dramatically. The actions of revolutionaries in the early
1930s also stoked the fears of both British colonial officials and the non-
official European community in Bengal. Although present in some form
since the beginning of the revolutionary movement before the Great War,
colonial anxieties regarding the potential of revolutionaries to disrupt
colonial administration and assassinate members of the British community
reached new levels. In particular, there was a marked decline in the morale
of British and Indian police and intelligence officers, leading to fears that
the intelligence networks of the Bengal Police would simply cease to func-
tion. Anxieties about the activities of Bengali revolutionaries, as we have
seen in the previous two chapters, led to the construction of an extensive
intelligence apparatus. The failures of that intelligence apparatus in the
early 1930s resulted in a renewed sense of anxiety—and at times panic—
which disillusioned individual officers and led colonial authorities to turn
to the British and Indian Army to bolster police morale and flagging intel-
ligence efforts. Bengal in the years after the Chittagong Armoury Raid was
thus markedly an “insecurity state,” and violence and the threat of vio-
lence was a marked feature of the British response to revolutionary
130 M. SILVESTRI
t errorism.13 Yet at the same time, the decade also featured the most promi-
nent attempts by the colonial state to reform and refashion the “Bengali
terrorist,” often in ways in which imperial values featured prominently.
1 The Aftermath of the Chittagong Armoury

Raid: Intelligence Failures and Frustrations
The Chittagong Armoury Raid revealed the weaknesses of police intelli-
gence in Bengal and stoked British-Indian anxieties about the potential of
the revolutionaries to threaten Europeans and destabilize colonial admin-
istration. It also had an immediate impact on revolutionary groups
throughout Bengal. In May 1930, the Government of Bengal noted that
“reports show that there is an eager impatience among the younger mem-
bers in several places to emulate or surpass the sensational exploit at
Chittagong and also to murder police officers.”14 A Government of India
report on terrorism, which drew heavily on the analysis of the Bengal IB,
noted how “recruits poured into the various groups in a steady stream”:
Some could not believe that such a daring coup was the work of Bengali
terrorists. When the truth was known the effect was electric, and from that
moment the outlook of the Bengal terrorists changed. The younger mem-
bers of all parties, whose heads were already crammed with ideas of driving
the British out of India by force of arms, but whose hands had been
restrained by their leaders from committing even an isolated murder,
clamoured for a chance to emulate the Chittagong terrorists.15
Young women were among the recruits who swelled the ranks of the revo-
lutionaries in these years, and the willingness of female revolutionaries to
participate in dacoities and political assassinations represented for intelli-
gence officers a new and sinister development in the revolutionary move-
ment. By the end of 1931, the IB had knowledge of at least 100 “female
terrorists.”16
The Bengal Police IB compiled a list of seventy-one terrorist “out-
rages” in 1930, almost all of which took place after the Armoury Raid.17
While some of these episodes simply involved weapons stolen by revolu-
tionaries or recovered by the police, the revolutionary groups staged a
series of attacks on senior police officials in the months following the
Chittagong uprising. On 25th August, a bomb was thrown at Calcutta
Police Commissioner Charles Tegart, but it failed to explode. Just four
days later, the Inspector General of the Bengal Police, F. J. Lowman, was
fatally shot and another British police superintendent wounded while visit-
ing a colleague in the Mitford Hospital in Dacca. On 1st December, two
participants in the Armoury Raid shot dead Railway Police Inspector
Tarini Mukharji, who was traveling on the same train in eastern Bengal as
Lowman’s successor as Inspector General. A week later, in an episode
which for both British officers and Bengalis revolutionaries loomed sec-
ond only to the Chittagong Armoury Raid, three revolutionaries—Benoy
Ghosh, Badal Gupta, and Dinesh Gupta—attacked British colonial ser-
vants at the heart of the colonial administration in Calcutta. Dressed in
European clothing and armed with revolvers, the three entered the
Writers’ Building in Dalhousie Square and killed Lt.-Colonel N. S.
Simpson, the Inspector General of Prisons, in his office, wounding two
other British officials and engaging in a gun battle with police.18
A Government of Bengal official later reflected that “in the war against
terrorism … the Bengal Intelligence Branch had been built up to an
extraordinary degree of efficiency.”19 Yet the Chittagong Armoury Raid
revealed many weaknesses in the intelligence apparatus, in spite of its elab-
orate structures and its overwhelming focus on a single aspect of anticolo-
nial activity, revolutionary terrorism. Indeed, by the end of the 1920s,
intelligence officers in the Bengal and Calcutta Police believed that the
revolutionaries were in a stronger position than they had been following
the royal amnesty of 1919. While hundreds of revolutionary suspects had
been detained without trial under the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Ordinance of 1924 and the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act
(BCLAA) of 1925, almost all had been released by 1928. The act expired
on 21 March 1930, although its provision allowing trial by special proce-
dure remained for another five years.
The use of detention without trial was a fundamental colonial strategy
for defeating the revolutionary movement, and it was intimately inter-
twined with police intelligence.20 Intelligence officers strongly and consis-
tently argued that the BCLAA of 1925 ought to remain permanent, as a
deterrent to revolutionary activity.21 Indeed, the Bengal Police maintained
that only the powers of detention and special tribunals to try revolutionary
suspects could stop the revolutionaries. The detention without trial of
thousands of suspects under the Defence of India Act during the second
half of the Great War was, in the view of the police, the means by which
the first generation of revolutionary organizations was broken, as confes-
sions flowed freely to the police from demoralized revolutionaries in
132 M. SILVESTRI
c ustody.22 In contrast, the Intelligence Branch believed that while they

had been obtained “a great deal of inside information” from detainees
under the 1925 BCLAA, they had “not so definitely broken the morale
that the arrested men are anxious to unburden their souls to us, which was
practically the position in 1918.”23
Intelligence Branch reports in the second half of the 1920s are pep-
pered with discussions of the revival and re-organization of revolutionary
groups; the creation of new organizations; and their efforts to stockpile
firearms and bombs in order to carry out acts of violence against the colo-
nial state.24 By this point, intelligence officers had identified Chittagong as
one of the Bengal districts whose revolutionaries posed the greatest
threat.25 While the IB saw Chittagong as “but little affected” by first revo-
lutionary campaign, both the noncooperation movement and revolution-
ary activity featured prominently there following the Great War.26 In 1925,
the Intelligence Branch reported that a section of Jugantar and two sec-
tions of Anushilan were active in Chittagong, and that in spite of the arrest
of Jugantar’s leader, Nogendra Sen (also known as Jhulu), “all accounts
agree that this section is well provided with bombs and arms and has
retained its tendency towards violence.”27 In addition to carrying out the
assassination of a local Police Sub-inspector, Chittagong revolutionaries
were also involved in the 1924 attempt to assassinate Charles Tegart and
the murder in Alipore Central Jail in 1926 of IB Special Superintendent
Bhupendranath Chatterji.
As was the case elsewhere in Bengal, former Chittagong detenus
released in 1928 were subjected to surveillance by the local DIB. This
“general watch” was extended to others whom the police considered
political suspects. But although police “watchers” filed regular reports,
these contained little illuminating information about the activities of these
revolutionary suspects.28 Following an abortive effort at an alliance
between the leadership of Jugantar and the Anushilan Samiti, younger
revolutionaries of both groups formed a “new amalgamated party” for
what the IB termed “immediate terrorism,” such as attacks on police sta-
tions.29 This led to more intensive surveillance of the Chittagong revolu-
tionaries, and in November 1929 the Central IB ordered the local DIB to
keep a number of ex-detenus under special watch. The Chittagong DIB
implemented a twenty-four-hour watch on the former detainees with
twenty-four constables. In February 1930, the surveillance was brought
under the direct control of the district superintendent, who urged coop-
eration between the uniformed police and DIB “‘in keeping a vigilant eye
upon the movements and haunts of political suspects.’”30 The Deputy

Inspector General of the IB found these arrangements inadequate, follow-
ing an inspection tour on 24–26 March 1930, and ordered the
Superintendent of Police, J. R. Johnson, to take “direct and complete
charge of the D. I. B. which had hitherto been working under the supervi-
sion of the Deputy Superintendent.” In addition, “immediate steps were
taken to intensify the system of watch and make it more effective.”31 The
watch staff was increased by a further twenty-two men, and police watch-
ers were posted at thirty-one fixed posts for twenty-four hours a day.32 In
April 1930, Johnson issued “a list of the more active local suspects” which
emphasized “the apprehension of terrorist activities and the necessity of a
strict watch on the movements of those suspected.”33
The ineffectiveness of the surveillance of the Chittagong revolutionar-
ies was the result of several factors. The first was the precautions taken by
the revolutionaries themselves. The “planning and organization” of the
Chittagong Armoury Raid, as one officer recalled, “was kept an unusually
close secret.”34 The revolutionaries were well aware of police surveillance
and in many cases simply allowed the watchers to track them to innocuous
locations such as the local Congress office.35 In addition, the revolutionar-
ies carried out counter-surveillance of the police watchers, and exploited
the Intelligence Branch’s reliance on informers in order to feed the police
misinformation. Through a college student who had turned police agent,
Jugantar members in Chittagong were able to convey to the police that
the revolutionaries planned to stage a mass meeting on 21st April—three
days after the Armoury Raid—in order to read aloud “‘the exploits of
revolutionaries from proscribed texts.’”36 While the reports compiled by
DIB watchers were later utilized to establish a conspiracy case against the
Chittagong Armoury Raiders, they did not provide the police with the
intelligence required to determine that a major offensive was imminent.
The second factor was a lack of coordination between the Central and
District Intelligence Branches. As noted above, the Central Intelligence
Branch in Calcutta had been aware of plans for widespread actions like
those of the Chittagong revolutionaries prior to April 1930. In a note
dated 28 November 1929, the IB warned that “at a recent meeting in
Calcutta” a number of revolutionaries
declared that their intention was to bring a rebellion in a particular district.

They proposed to take by surprise the district police and capture the district
treasury and armoury. Even if they sustain the attack for an hour and then
134 M. SILVESTRI
die fighting as the Irish rebels did in their Easter rising in Dublin, they con-
sider it will have a tremendous moral effect. And they have decided to orga-
nize Chittagong and Barisal districts for a rebellion.37
Even though this information was circulated to all District Intelligence

Branches in the province, it is questionable how seriously it was taken.
In spite of this warning, there was little communication between the
Central IB and the DIB in Chittagong, as well as an unwillingness to share
information with government officials outside of the Intelligence Branch.
The Central IB claimed to have forwarded “all available information,” but
local intelligence officers were not made aware that the main informant in
Chittagong, whose identity was never revealed to them, “had ceased to be
able to work as an agent.” The Deputy Inspector General in charge of
Chittagong was apparently not informed of any secret information, even
that relating to “ordinary” police work, such as increasing the postings of
sentries. In addition, the District Magistrate of Chittagong was not made
aware until the end of 1929 that Chittagong “was a dangerous district
from the terrorist revolutionary [sic] point of view.” Nor was any of the
IB’s information about a potential rising in Chittagong shared with mili-
tary authorities in eastern Bengal. As W. D. R. Prentice of the Government
of Bengal observed, “It is easy to be wise after the event but the conclu-
sion has been forced upon me that the craze for secrecy has been followed
to excess and that general efficiency has suffered thereby. Liaison arrange-
ments have to be improved, and the policy must be one of trust rather
than mistrust.”38
Another factor, according to Prentice, was that the local police work
was “very bad,” which he attributed to the “frequent change of the offi-
cers in charge of police work at Chittagong.” In spite of the elaborate
intelligence structures that had been developed over the previous decades,
staff was in short supply and in many districts simply not competent. The
lack of systematic training for intelligence officers meant that it was diffi-
cult to produce new officers quickly. The DIB in Chittagong made almost
no headway in obtaining information about the activities of local revolu-
tionaries either before or after the raid. British officers there placed the
blame for this squarely on the shoulders of their Indian subordinates, who
played a critical role in intelligence-gathering. The Circle Inspector in
Chittagong, according to Deputy Inspector General J. C. Farmer, “proved
a complete dud” and was replaced, while District Intelligence Officer
Sarada Bhattacharji
has been a complete failure and his incompetency merits his reversion to the
rank of Sub-inspector and I have told him I shall draw up proceedings to
this and unless he can show something to prove his competency to continue
as Inspector within the next week. He has been here 3 years and has not got
a single source of any description. A Muhammadan source went to him with
information before the occurrence but he turned him away saying his infor-
mation was unbelievable, and now he [the source] won’t work for him but
is working directly under [District Superintendent] Johnson.39
Finally, police intelligence in Chittagong was hampered by both the

economic disruption of the Great Depression, as well as the Indian
National Congress’ civil disobedience campaign. The disastrous impact of
the Depression on peasant indebtedness, particularly in eastern Bengal,
led to an increase in robbery and dacoity. These often took the form of
attacks by tenants or peasant creditors on moneylenders in which the
“dacoits” attempted to destroy contracts and financial documents as well
as carry off property. The overall dacoity figures for the province more
than doubled to an average of 1543 per year from 1930 to 1934.40 The
contemporaneous civil disobedience campaign was both “multifarious and
violent” in Bengal, where the number of arrests (15,000) and violent inci-
dents (136) reflected the highest totals of any Indian province in
1930–1931.41 The IB catalogued a total of thirty-one “outrages” associ-
ated with the campaign in 1930; these included bomb attacks on police
stations, dacoities, attacks on policemen, and police firings on crowds.42 In
Chittagong, the District Superintendent of Police noted that from July to
October 1930 the police were preoccupied with countering Gandhian
civil disobedience in the district, including “the picketing of schools, col-
leges, liquor and cloth shops. This involved very heavy duties on all ranks
and much valuable time had to be lost on this account.”43 As a result, “the
work of rounding up the rebels” was “practically at a standstill owing to
the other calls upon the police.”44
2 Police Violence and Chitforce

While the inadequacies of police intelligence were revealed in the immedi-
ate aftermath of the Raid, the Government of Bengal’s efforts to capture
the Chittagong insurgents was to be a long and painstaking process, in
spite of the presence soon after 18th April of a variety of military forces.
The slowness of the military campaign against the insurgents further
136 M. SILVESTRI
fueled the breakdown of police morale and led to the use of arbitrary vio-
lence against suspected revolutionaries and, more generally, Hindus in
Chittagong.
The revolutionaries suffered heavy casualties during and shortly after
the raid; a dozen revolutionaries died, either on the spot or later, in a gun
battle in the hills outside Chittagong four days after the raid. The revolu-
tionaries had fought bravely with police muskets against military police
(the Eastern Frontier Rifles) and Auxiliary Force (the Surma Valley Light
Horse) troops armed with rifles and Lewis guns, and in spite of their casu-
alties and lack of supplies and weaponry, efforts to apprehend or kill the
remaining rebels proved difficult. This was despite the fact that the police,
Auxiliary and military police forces outnumbered the rebels at least five to
one. A month following the raid, the Commander of Presidency and
Assam District attributed the failure chiefly to a lack of clear command,
and “too great an inclination to guard Chittagong instead of attacking the
raiders.”45
Divisions over the role of the military police continued in the subse-
quent months, as officers were reluctant to engage in anything that they
considered to be “police operations.” Lt.-Col. E. D. Dallas Smith of the
Eastern Frontier Rifles, who had led the attack against the rebels on 22nd
April, soon came to question whether his forces had any role to play there
at all. The decision of the revolutionaries to split up into small parties and
wear their ordinary clothing made “operations of a military nature
extremely difficult, if not impossible.”46 In August 1930, the Inspector
General of the Bengal Police complained that the 150 men of the Eastern
Frontier Rifles posted to Chittagong were mainly employed guarding the
Auxiliary Force armories, which he believed should have been the respon-
sibility of the military.
Diverse strategies were considered for tracking down the raiders. The
commander of the Eastern Frontier Rifles contemplated bombing the
raiders’ positions in the jungles outside of Chittagong town.47 While the
use of air power formed a prominent colonial strategy for defeating insur-
gents in the interwar era, in this instance local authorities had to settle for
a plane for reconnaissance hired from the Air India Transport Company.
The plane made two flights in an unsuccessful search for the revolutionar-
ies on 30th April and 1st May, at which time the authorities agreed that
the revolutionaries had split up, and the plane was therefore of no further
use. Taking a markedly different strategy, the District Superintendent
sought to draw on indigenous knowledge through the use of fifty of the
tribal people known as Santhals employed by the town of Chittagong to

search for arms abandoned by the revolutionaries and evidence of funeral
pyres or freshly dug graves. In addition, a search party of Santhals was
deputed to follow the routes taken by the rebels.48
It soon became apparent that intelligence, not air power or the tracking
powers of indigenous peoples, would enable the authorities to locate the
revolutionaries. As in past police actions against the revolutionaries, colo-
nial authorities were dependent on human intelligence, which in the after-
math of the Armoury Raid was sorely lacking. Dallas Smith complained to
the Inspector General in early May that “it is getting increasingly difficult
to know what action to take or in which direction to try any operation, in
the absence of any information as to the whereabouts of any band of reb-
els.” DIG J. C. Farmer, who was involved in the search missions, con-
curred: “The futility of raids into the jungles where one has to creep along
for miles in single file unable to see a yard around you was quickly realised,
but the difficulty in getting anyone to go into the jungle and get ‘khabor’
[news] was a snag I had not anticipated.”49
The authorities in Chittagong quickly realized that no information
about the whereabouts of the raiders was forthcoming from the local
Hindu population. The largely urban and middle-class Hindus of
Chittagong, who made up over 30 percent of the population in the dis-
tricts surrounding the town, continued to display strong support for the
revolutionaries.50 The task of the DIB was further complicated by the fact
that the predominantly Muslim peasantry also gave the terrorists a mea-
sure of support. Farmer attributed this not to outright support for the
rebels, but to the evident weakness of colonial power in Chittagong in the
aftermath of the raid. “Government being no longer a real factor,” he
wrote, local Muslims were “not willing to incur the displeasure of the
Hindus by taking an active part in hunting out the rebels.”51
A year after the raid, the District Superintendent reported that no offi-
cer in the countryside or the town had succeeded in “securing an infor-
mant who can give any inside information of any value,” and mentioned
several instances where boys who had offered information to the police
were “severely assaulted.” The District Magistrate noted grimly that “the
most disquieting manner in which practically all sources of information
have dried up, a fact which indicates that they have formed their own
opinion as to which side is winning.”52 Six months later, the Government
of Bengal reported a loss of morale among members of the local police,
who were “not too anxious to obtain information even if it is forthcoming.”
138 M. SILVESTRI
The revolutionaries, in contrast, were “fully informed of all movements

against them.”53
The inability of police to gain information about the raiders who
remained at liberty led in 1931 to the deployment of military forces in the
district. In April 1931, two companies of the 1/8th Gurkha Rifles were
sent to Chittagong, but their effectiveness was hampered by the refusal of
their commanding officer to employ them “on anything in the nature of
Police duties.” As a result, no troops were available for raids, a situation
that the Bengal Police tried to remedy by sending an additional 120 con-
stables and 1 inspector, 2 sub-inspectors, and 10 head constables to
Chittagong. Less than a month later, the Gurkhas’ withdrawal was
prompted by the army’s unhappiness that soldiers might have to assume
police duties and, more importantly, because their presence in Chittagong
reduced the number of troops available in case of an emergency elsewhere
in the province. In his final report, the Gurkhas’ commanding officer
stated that “the only duty for a military force to do at Chittagong was to
wait for a situation to develop,” and “from a military point of view the
retention of troops here without a real military objective was undesirable,
especially in a large district like the Presidency and Assam District which
has a very small regular garrison.”54
The temporary posting of troops in Chittagong and increased levels of
police thus did little to improve the paltry flow of intelligence or assuage
the rising sense of desperation, anger, and frustration felt by the police. In
August 1931, district superintendent J. R. Johnson expressed the opinion
that Surjya Sen was well aware of the strain on local police, and was
patiently waiting for an opportunity to strike back: “However vigilant we
may be there is bound to come a time when the overworked watcher or
officer is going to make a mistake. We shall then have another sensation in
Chittagong with the necessary success of the terrorist party and perhaps
another good life gone.” Johnson made a plea to the Inspector General
for a military solution to the apprehension of the revolutionaries. All that
was needed, he wrote using capital letters for emphasis, was someone to
administer martial law “and a certain number of troops”:
THIS IS WHAT EXASPERATES ME AS THE SOLUTION AND THE

ANTIDOTE TO THESE DEEDS SEEMS SO SIMPLE ONLY IF WE
CAN GET THE POWER. We have all the forces and the personnel requi-
site and we only want the powers. ALL WE WANT IN CHITTAGONG IS
THE EXECUTIVE ORDER FOR MARTIAL LAW AND LEAVE US TO

SETTLE OUR OWN TROUBLES ONCE FOR ALL.55
The ability of the Chittagong revolutionaries to not only evade but also
attack the police was dramatically illustrated just a few days later. On 30
August 1931, Police Inspector Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah was fatally shot
in the chest immediately after a football match in Chittagong. Along with
another Muslim officer, Ahsanullah had emerged as the leading Indian
officer in the local DIB. He was primarily responsible for the investigation
of the Chittagong Armoury Raid case and was described as Superintendent
Johnson’s “right hand man”; the Government observed that “his death
inflicts a severe loss on the police.”56 Revolutionaries in contrast reviled
Ahsanullah as a brutal figure who was given free rein by the authorities to
carry out beatings, torture, and other abuses.57
The killing of Inspector Ahsanullah also sparked one of the most noto-
rious episodes of police violence in the history of the Bengali revolution-
ary movement. At Ahsanullah’s funeral the day after his murder, which
was attended by thousands of local Muslims, two shots were fired not far
from the funeral procession. Later that morning, more than 280 predomi-
nantly Hindu-owned shops in and around Chittagong suffered three
hours of looting with damages estimated at around one million rupees.
While the Government of Bengal’s enquiry placed the blame for the dis-
order on Muslims “from the laboring class” as well as “Muhammadan bad
characters,” what emerged most clearly from events following Ahsanullah’s
murder were the punitive actions of the police.58 While these events have
been analyzed in the context of the history of “communal riots,” they
shed more light on the failures of police intelligence following the Armoury
Raid and police use of violence and coercion in the anti-terrorist cam-
paign.59 According to an enquiry carried out by the Indian National
Congress, armed police, including Gurkhas and British officers, pursued a
“general vendetta” against Hindus in Chittagong. “They particularly
attacked the houses of those who had incurred the displeasures of the local
authorities, including political ‘suspects,’ pleaders in the Chittagong
Armoury Raid case, and the men employed in at least one well-known
printing press.”60
Although the Government of Bengal denied many of the charges (such
as the claim that police stood by while looting took place), their own
report detailed numerous police reprisals following Ahsanullah’s death. In
particular, police targeted Panchajanya Press, the publisher of a nationalist
140 M. SILVESTRI
newspaper of the same name, which was loathed by police for its sympathy
for the Armoury Raiders.61 Possibly accompanied by two Indian DIB offi-
cers, a detachment of Auxiliary Forces beat workers at the press and
smashed the presses with hammers. Superintendent J. R. Johnson, who
had dispatched the Auxiliary Forces to the Panchajanya Press, also ordered
Assistant Superintendent Robert Shooter to take a party of Eastern
Frontier Rifles and search for arms and absconders in Patiya and Boalkhani
thanas near Chittagong in order to “convey a severe warning to suspects
and persons believed to have sheltered absconders.” Shooter took a force
of 100 Eastern Frontier Rifles, officers from the EFR and Assam Rifles and
some DIB members. The police divided into two groups, each with a
guide who was “familiar with the locality and a list of suspects.” The
inhabitants of homes were ordered out and police were ordered to go
inside and break open all boxes. The Government of Bengal acknowl-
edged the “irregular” procedure in these searches, in which at least four
homes were burnt:
Admitting the necessity of a rapid search for absconders and arms, there is
no doubt that the main object of the expedition was punitive. Regarded as
a search there was an absence of the usual procedure. The urgency and the
number of houses might excuse the lack of warrants. But no provision was
made for witnesses; the owners of the houses were made to stand aside and
were not given the opportunity of opening locked boxes and cupboards….
I am forced therefore to the conclusion that the main object of the searches
was to punish those persons whose names were to appear on the police list
as suspects, harbourers and absconders.62
In addition, Shooter administered “corporal punishment” to at least

one suspect he found during the searches, and a number of boys at local
schools were beaten as well. Eighteen boys were “chastised” at the Rahatali
HE School, while at the Saroatali School Shooter personally “chastised the
boys of the higher classes” on the grounds that schoolboys there had
recently taken part in demonstrations in support of Ram Krishna Biswas, a
revolutionary convicted and executed for the assassination of a police
inspector. Both Biswas and Ahsanullah’s assassin had been pupils at the
school, and police found the words “without bloodshed, no country can
attain freedom” written on a wall there. The indiscriminate beatings and
attacks revealed police frustration at the long-standing appeal of the
r evolutionaries to Bengali Hindu youth, and the use of schools as recruit-

ing grounds for the revolutionary movement.
None of the officers involved in the destruction of the press or the beat-
ings at the schools were punished, though severe censures were given to
Shooter, Johnson and Kemm, the District Magistrate, and censures to
three other British officers. Neither the censures nor the report were made
public.63 Rather, while admitting that the police “had taken the law into
their own hands,” the Government of Bengal emphasized the “extenuat-
ing circumstances” in form of the “severe strain” they had faced from
“dangerous and elusive gangs of murderers” which had placed “the police
… entirely on the defensive, and baffled at every turn when they attempted
the offensive.”64 Shooter, whom one ICS officer considered “one of the
brightest and most promising officers the police have had for a long time,”
after weeks of depression committed suicide by shooting himself in the
head with his revolver.65 Although neither depression nor suicide was
unusual among members of the Indian Police, the Government of India
believed his death was due to his being made a scapegoat for the failure of
the local authorities to provide him with the powers they needed to sup-
press the revolutionaries.66
The evident loss of control of the police led to major changes in the way
that the anti-terrorist campaign in Chittagong was conducted. Police
operations were placed under the command of a Deputy Inspector
General, who was to serve as a liaison between the police and the Indian
Army troops who were now to be stationed in Chittagong. On 30
November 1931, the first troops—one battalion of the 5th Mahratta Light
Infantry and two companies of the 8th Gurkha Rifles—in what became
known as “Chitforce” arrived in Chittagong.67
The military were utilized primarily for cordon and search operations
conducted with the police. The area around Chittagong was divided into
five subareas, with Chittagong itself the sixth. Three wireless stations were
set up, each under the command of a senior military officer. On receiving
information about the potential location of rebels, the military cordoned
off an area while the police conducted the actual searches.68 In the largest
operation to date on 11th December, an entire village, an area of six square
miles, was cordoned off by soldiers and search parties spent the entire day
going through it. Although the search was deemed to have been carried
out on the basis of “reliable” information, neither terrorist suspects nor
useful information was found.69
142 M. SILVESTRI
That result would prove to be typical for Chitforce. Even though

reports featured optimistic pronouncements that troops were acquiring “a
most intimate local knowledge of the areas in which they were working”
and that the flow of “information, the most important factor of all, has
improved, and will undoubtedly continue to improve,” the Chitforce
operations accomplished little in terms of suppressing the Chittagong
revolutionaries.70 T. G. H. Holman, police liaison officer with Mahratta
Light Infantry, recalled the dismal results of early searches: “With a hur-
riedly augmented intelligence service and guides lacking local knowledge,
only luck could land an absconder in his own warren.” What success
Chitforce had was through painstaking searches of area after area, and the
results were chiefly limited to the recovery of arms rather than the arrest
of revolutionaries.71 In March 1932, an India Office official observed
gloomily that “it is difficult to make out from these reports exactly what is
happening but the practical results up-to-date appear to be nil.”72 Despite
hundreds of searches, none of the raiders were apprehended by Chitforce,
and the final results of the operation, which lasted until the end of 1932,
were “negligible.”73
Most notably, Chitforce failed to capture Surjya Sen, the main architect
of the Chittagong Armoury Raid. Indeed, one encounter on 13 June
1932 resulted in the death of a British officer in the Gurkha Rifles and the
revolutionary leader’s escape. Upon learning that Sen was in a house in
Dhalgat, about ten miles from Chittagong, Captain Cameron of the
Gurkha Rifles chose not to assemble the entire platoon of troops he was
commanding, and instead proceeded there with only two sub-inspectors,
two constables, and eight Gurkha soldiers. Cameron was shot and killed
by the revolutionary Nirmal Sen while searching the house. After his
death, one of the sub-inspectors and a havildar returned to the military
camp at Patiya to get reinforcements, which allowed Sen to escape.
Cameron had underestimated the fighting abilities of the revolutionaries,
and his actions reflected the mounting frustration of colonial officials at
their failure to apprehend the architect of the Armoury Raid. The District
Magistrate observed that the lesson learned was that a platoon of troops
was necessary for cordon and search operations, and that greater coopera-
tion between police and military forces was also required: “The relative
responsibility of the officer commanding the police on these occasions
must be clearly defined, and that the officer commanding the troops must
be empowered to take any means necessary including opening fire to
ensure the safety of the party engaged on the search.”74
Lastly, Sen and the revolutionaries demonstrated a continuing capacity

to stage attacks in Chittagong. On the night of 24 September 1932, the
female revolutionary Pritilata Waddadar, who had been recruited by Sen,
led an attack on the Parhartali Railway Institute outside Chittagong, an
Anglo-Indian club patronized primarily by the subordinate staff of the
railways. The revolutionaries threw two bombs and fired revolvers that
killed one woman and wounded several others, including two police offi-
cers.75 Waddadar, who took cyanide while the other revolutionaries
escaped, exemplified for intelligence officers the new threat posed by
female revolutionaries. She was dressed in men’s clothing, and carried not
only revolver cartridges but a long manuscript in which she exhorted other
Bengali women to follow her example of patriotism and sacrifice.76 The
attack on the Parhartali Institute was the revolutionaries’ response to the
loud public support with which the European community in Chittagong
had called for the elimination of the threat of “Bengali terrorism.”77 As we
will see, the white population across Bengal also threatened violent repri-
sals against the revolutionaries.
3 European Community and Reprisals

By the latter half of 1931, the revolutionaries’ targeting of Britons—
including both colonial officials and members of the civilian community—
induced fears approaching panic not only among members of the police,
but among the British-Indian community throughout Bengal. The
European community in Bengal was one of the largest and most politically
active in the Raj, and it played a prominent role in provincial politics in the
interwar era.78 Calcutta’s network of European clubs brought British-
Indian businessmen and other prominent members of the non-official
European community together with colonial officials and created the
opportunity for British-Indians to protest policies which they opposed,
particularly those perceived to threaten their political and economic posi-
tion.79 Calcutta, the center of British-Indian economic, social, and politi-
cal life in Bengal, was, in David Washbrook’s estimation, perhaps the only
place where Britons in India were “able to make a ‘British India,’ which
excluded everything and everybody else.”80
This “British India” in Calcutta was characterized, as elsewhere in colo-
nial India in the post-1857 era, by a recurrent pattern of colonial anxieties
focused on the fear of rebellion.81 The Bengali revolutionary movement
intensified these fears.82 The escalation of the revolutionaries’ campaign
144 M. SILVESTRI
against the colonial state following the Chittagong Armoury Raid led to
an even greater sense of anxiety on the part of the British-Indian commu-
nity. While “non-official” Europeans had previously been the inadvertent
victims of revolutionary assassination attempts, revolutionaries in the early
1930s began to target prominent members of the British-Indian commu-
nity. R. E. A. Ray observed in 1931 that “a new feature of terrorism in
Bengal is the determination to murder not only British officials of high
rank but also Europeans generally.”83 As we have seen, two of the most
prominent attacks by the Chittagong revolutionaries were aimed at
European clubs, the distinctly imperial institutions through which the
British-Indian community sought to maintain and display the power of
the white colonial elite.84 The Intelligence Branch later observed that by
early 1932, “the air was thick with threats to carry out indiscriminate mas-
sacres of Europeans in clubs and cinemas.”85
As Kama Maclean notes, the psychological impact of terrorism on the
British-Indian community was substantial.86 Anxiety and fear, which
already to a considerable degree shaped the everyday lives of colonizers,
came particularly to the forefront with the wave of revolutionary assassina-
tions in Bengal. They stand as a prominent example of how, as Harald
Fischer-Tiné and Christina Whyte have noted, “the history of colonial
empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions
such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment, as well as by the regular occur-
rence of panics.”87 The possibility of assassination in one’s daily life—at
the home, office, sports ground, cinema, club, or golf course—created a
palpable sense of fear among the British-Indian community and a suspi-
cion of bhadralok Hindu youth as potential assassins. In Chittagong, for
example, a young Bengali was arrested for “loitering in very suspicious
circumstances” near the ninth tee of a golf course.88 Familiar elements of
British-Indian colonial life—the club, the golf links, the verandah—were
thus transformed into a “landscape of fear.”89
The attacks and threats of attacks on colonial institutions during the
1930s raised the ever-present specter of a repeat of the “Mutiny” of
1857.90 Female Britons were not the revolutionaries’ specific targets, but
attacks such as the one on the Parhartali Railway Institute led to the deaths
of British-Indian women, recalling the mass slaughter of men and women
which had taken place at Cawnpore, and the rape of white women widely
but erroneously believed to have taken place in 1857. The Intelligence
Branch speculated that if the Chittagong revolutionaries had been able to
take over the town in 1930, in addition to the execution of British officials
“other barbarities would undoubtedly have been committed.”91 Following

the rioting that followed Ahsanullah’s funeral in August 1931, ICS officer
John Younie expressed happiness that “with so many troops there there is
no danger of this becoming a second Cawnpore.”92
Fears of attacks by revolutionaries prompted a new array of security
measures for the British population. In the early 1930s, as David Laushey
observes, “British officials in Bengal turned their quarters into ‘small forts’
surrounded by barbed wire and heavily guarded by sentries.”93 Officials
believed to be under the threat of assassination received an armed police-
man as an escort, police guards were posted at government buildings, and
small bodies of European special constables were created.94 H. Quinton,
district magistrate at Alipore around this time, recalled how the compound
in which his bungalow was located was “enclosed in a high wire cage”
whose entrance was guarded day and night. District magistrates were allo-
cated two guards armed with revolvers and were required themselves to
carry a loaded revolver and attended weekly target practice.95 In
Mymensingh District the wives of British officials took target practice with
revolvers as well; Coralie Taylor, the wife of the local district superinten-
dent, described their lives as a “state of siege” and expressed the hope that
her husband would be able to obtain several additional revolvers. “We are
again prisoners in the constant care of armed guards,” she wrote to her
mother in November 1933.96
Simon Ball has identified a “‘liberal’ script for dealing with political
violence” in the imperial state that sought to minimize the threat of
conspiracies and adopt a generally stoic approach to political assassina-
tion.97 Yet as Ball also acknowledges, the liberal approach was always
more prominent among government officials in the metropole than
among “men on the spot” in the Empire. Stoicism was notably less
prominent among the British-Indian community in Calcutta than in
London, and even less so in the mofussil, or hinterland, of Bengal, par-
ticularly in locales such as Chittagong, which was remote from Dacca,
the major urban area of eastern Bengal, let alone Calcutta or New Delhi.
The British-Indian community in Bengal, directly threatened by vio-
lence and assassination in the early 1930s, advocated a militant response
to revolutionary terrorism that went beyond simply elaborate security
precautions. Members of the non-official community, and some govern-
ment officials as well, called for reprisals against and even summary exe-
cutions of revolutionaries in custody. In August 1931, the British-Indian
Statesman approvingly quoted views favoring “a vigorous policy of reprisal
146 M. SILVESTRI
and summary vengeance,” arguing that “terrorism must be driven out

by terror.”98
On 29 October 1931, a revolutionary made an unsuccessful attempt to
assassinate the president of the European Association, Edward Villiers. By
this point, the Government of Bengal was concerned not only about the
flagging morale of police and the broadening ranks of the revolutionaries,
but also the danger of reprisals by the province’s European community.
Following a discussion with the Inspector General, the DIG of the
Intelligence Branch, the Chief Secretary and other government officials,
H. W. Emerson of the Government of India reported that “there is a very
real danger of the European population taking the law into their own
hands, if outrages continue.” Bengal officials agreed that if the attempt on
the life of Villiers had succeeded, “extensive reprisals would have taken
place in Calcutta and elsewhere.”99
British-Indian fears of “Bengali terrorism” led to the formation in 1931
of a new political organization known as the Royalists. Composed of
young British-Indian men, the Royalists sought to exert pressure on both
the European Association and the Government of Bengal in support of a
more forceful government action against the revolutionaries. In the words
of one of their organizers, the Royalists sought “to support and strengthen
the policy of the European Association and to bring all possible constitu-
tional pressure to bear on the Government to enforce law and order.”100
The Royalists deployed the language of loyalism utilized across the “British
world” from Ulster to southern Africa to Australasia, asserting fealty to
crown and empire while disparaging the policies of government.101 In
their manifesto, the Royalists declared, that “a severely critical attitude
towards the Government is not incompatible with loyalty to the King.”102
A primary target of their ire was Sir Stanley Jackson, Governor of Bengal
from 1927 to 1932, who was widely seen as ineffectual and overly concil-
iatory toward Indian nationalism.
While the Royalists stressed they were “not a militant body,” the threat
of violence and military action was present in their statements. “We wish
to organise in such a way,” the manifesto read, “that, if the emergency
arises where the Community must protect itself, the organization can be
used for the formation of a defense force.”103 In a letter to the Times writ-
ten to counter reports that the Royalists favored reprisals against the revo-
lutionaries, D. W. Mullock, one of the movement’s organizers, sought to
convey that a “state of war” existed in Bengal, and that the British-Indian
community, already armed, was close to taking action to defend itself.
Referencing the failed assassination of Villiers and the shooting of sessions

judge R. R. Garlick earlier in the year, Mullock wrote
After Mr. Garlick’s murder and again after the attack on Mr. Villiers feeling
ran very high among our community, and on the latter occasion only the
assurance of the delegation which saw the Governor that Government was
really alive to the situation, and their further assurance that some visible sign
of that realization would soon be apparent, prevented some more forcible
demonstration of feeling than can be expressed merely by the passing of a
resolution.104
Following the failed assassination attempt on Villiers, the Royalists issued

a manifesto, which occasioned a rare commentary on British-Indian poli-
tics from the Raj’s intelligence officers. In his weekly report, the Director
of the Intelligence Bureau observed that the terrorist situation in Bengal
was “steadily deteriorating,” and that the Royalists had “flooded Calcutta
with leaflets demanding action on the part of Government.105 The Royalist
manifesto declared that “Congress TERRORISM must be CRUSHED,”
and listed the names of British and Indians recently killed or wounded by
the revolutionaries, concluding with “WE WANT ACTION.”106
While Villiers’ survival may have prevented reprisals by the Royalists,
men of the British-Indian community in Chittagong participated in retal-
iatory attacks following the shooting of Inspector Ahsanullah in August
1931. The local superintendent of police had called out members of the
local Auxiliary Force who had been enrolled as special constables; the
men, however, refused to turn out as constables, instead appearing at the
local police station in their military uniforms with rifles and a Lewis gun.
Rather than dispersing the men, the superintendent suggested to one of
their officers that “they could visit the Panchajanya Press and ensure that
it ceased to function as a press.” The men destroyed the printing presses
and assaulted workers there; the Government of Bengal’s inquiry con-
cluded that “they were neither Auxiliary Force nor special constables but
an unlawful assembly.”107
A desire for retribution against the revolutionaries was not limited to
the non-official community. In 1932, British colonial officials in Dacca
expressed concern that it was “only a matter of time” before assassinations
caused the colonial administration to be “paralysed for lack of officers.”108
In a three-page memorandum, they advocated for “very much wider pow-
ers” against the revolutionaries; although they did not advocate reprisals,
148 M. SILVESTRI
their proposals included making the possession of pistols, revolvers or

“other lethal weapons” capital offenses. They also advocated collective
punishments of the families of those convicted of terrorist offenses, who
were to have all of their property confiscated and be deprived of govern-
ment positions, as well as against localities deemed to have sheltered revo-
lutionaries.109 In a proposal that echoed the Murderous Outrages Act,
Dacca officials called for trials, sentences and executions to be carried out
immediately. Like the “fanatics” of the Northwest Frontier, the “Bengali
terrorists” were to have no rights of appeal; the terror of immediate capital
sentences were to be a deterrent to terrorism.110
Such appeals for summary justice also found supporters at the highest
level of the Bengal government. In a memo of March 1932, Chief Secretary
R. N. Reid complained that “our officers are exposed to war risks, on
unfair conditions. The enemy attack under any and every circumstance,
can chose their time and place, and it is only they who do the attacking.”
The solution, Reid argued, was to “meet terror with terror” in the form of
reprisals against revolutionaries:
The best form of defense is attack and the time has come when we ought to
ask ourselves whether we should not meet terror with terror as an act of
statesmanship, let alone a duty to our officers. Fear and self-interest are the
dominating motives which actuate the terrorist and if we can touch them we
shall make some advance. The obvious line is reprisals on hostages. We have
the hostages in the shape of 1000 hostages. It would be very easy to
announce that for every Government official killed 3 or 4 or 5 or any num-
ber which the Government thought suitable to the occasion, would be taken
out and shot. The terrorist has up to now been able to bank on Government
never going outside normal, or only slightly abnormal, methods, never to
attempt to really hurt them. Detention without trial is abnormal but it does
not hurt … If they knew the gloves were off and Government were deter-
mined to use its power and its resources ruthlessly in order to defeat the
enemy, we should put an end to this menace.111
Reid stated that his memo was based on conversations with Government
of Bengal officers and was “an attempt to put into writing what I know a
great many, probably most officers feel. I fear it is not practical politics
perhaps to talk of reprisals, but I do feel we are moving in that direction,
and it is perhaps of some use to take out the idea and have a look at it.”112
The responses of the British-Indian community in Bengal to the inten-
sified revolutionary offensive of the 1930s bore marked similarities to
those of other white communities in the British Empire facing violence

and insurgency from indigenous populations. Although India was never a
colony of white settlement, the response of Bengal’s British-Indian com-
munity—a group with a distinct sense of identity and a history of political
and economic influence—bore similarities to the later response of the
British community in Kenya during the Mau Mau insurgency, which John
Lonsdale has characterized as “the pained panic of paternalism betrayed.”113
In 1930s Bengal, as in 1950s Kenya, this panic took place in spite of the
fact that the actual levels of violence against Britons were extremely low—
fewer than ten British-Indians in Bengal lost their lives to revolutionaries
during the 1930s—relative to the overall scale of the conflict. While the
British-Indian press, due to pressure from the Government of India, gen-
erally advocated restraint and took a moderate line regarding the threat of
terrorism in Bengal, expatriate Britons in the province did not “panic
quietly.”114
4 Military Intelligence Officers

The Government of Bengal’s efforts to restore the morale of colonial offi-
cials and the British-Indian population and revitalize the attenuated net-
works of police intelligence became intertwined during the first half of the
1930s. The deployment of military forces was one strategy employed by
colonial authorities not only to attempt to apprehend the insurgents, but
to reassure the British-Indian population of Bengal after the Chittagong
Armoury Raid. Tea planter Alexander Burnett of the Surma Valley Light
Horse was sent to Chittagong immediately after the raid. He recalled that
with the rebels still at large and “not a single rifle or musket (apart from a
few sporting guns) to defend the town … the residents on our arrival were
in a state of nervous tension … Our first duty was to march through the
town at various points to create the impression that troops had arrived in
force.”115 Yet on the whole the deployment of military forces in Chittagong,
and throughout Bengal, was a slow process, and British morale and intel-
ligence networks remained weakened for several years.
The reluctance of the Indian Army to deploy troops in Chittagong
reflected an ambiguity regarding the internal security role of the army in
late colonial India: were troops to prevent the breakdown of public order,
or only assist civil authorities in case of an outbreak of rebellion?116 Military
authorities were particularly hesitant to send troops to provinces such as
Bengal and Madras where the inhabitants were regarded as “non-martial,”
150 M. SILVESTRI
believing that such demonstrations would encourage rather than deter

anticolonial opposition.117 This reluctance also reflected the Government
of India’s desire, in the wake of the 1919 Amritsar massacre and post-war
retrenchment, for provincial governments to build up their own armed
police reserves rather than relying on the military to quell civil disorder.118
The attachment to “minimum force” in British imperial thinking, as
Huw Bennett has recently argued, can be exaggerated, however, and
“exemplary force” continued to be deployed within the empire.119 In
practice, British and Indian troops continued to be deployed to suppress
peasant and tribal uprisings, labor unrest, and nationalist protests in India
throughout the interwar period.120 An important reason why the military
was not deployed extensively either in Chittagong or elsewhere in Bengal
following the Armoury Raid is that commanders believed there was no
role for them to play in what was fundamentally a matter for police intel-
ligence officers. When, after repeated requests, two companies of the
1/8th Gurkha Rifles were dispatched to Chittagong at the end of April
1931, their commanding officer kept them in reserve as a “striking force,”
and refused to allow them to do anything which he considered “in the
nature of Police duties,” such as patrols outside the town. After less than
two weeks, the commanding officer in Calcutta complained that the
Indian Army’s internal security arrangements in the region were “entirely
upset by the battalion being locked up at Chittagong,” and that he was
“most emphatically anxious that the 1/8th Gurkhas be recalled from
Chittagong at the earliest possible moment.”121
In addition to asking the military to take on duties best left to the
police, military commanders believed that civil authorities in Bengal had
not worked out a clear role for troops in the campaign against the revolu-
tionaries. At a conference in November 1931 which included the Director
of the Intelligence Bureau, the Inspector General of the Bengal Police and
the DIG of the Intelligence Branch, H. W. Emerson of the Government
of India reported that the Government of Bengal’s attitude regarding the
plan of operations against the revolutionaries was “most unsatisfactory,”
and that no detailed plans had been worked out. Civilian and military
officials also disagreed on how operations were to be carried out. Emerson
reported that
there was not the understanding and spirit of co-operation between the two
that was desirable. My impression was that the military were not to blame in
this and that they were ready to give all assistance possible. It is, however,
right to say that part of the difficulty was due to the unwillingness in the past
of the military to undertake what they regard as police duties, and, since it
is, in practice, extremely difficult to define what police duties are, the civil
authorities were afraid lest the military assistance might not give the relief to
the police that was desirable.122
The arrival of Sir John Anderson as Governor of Bengal in March 1932

led to renewed efforts to elicit the cooperation of the Indian military in
the campaign against the revolutionaries.123 Anderson, former Home
Secretary and Undersecretary of State in Dublin Castle, drew extensively
on his experience during the Anglo-Irish War in his tenure as governor.
He placed particular focus on the issue of civil-military collaboration.
Several months after his arrival, the Government of Bengal submitted a
“Trial of Terrorist Offenses” bill, based on the 1920 Restoration of Order
in Ireland Act, which allowed for military tribunals to try certain offenses.124
This legislative effort was rejected by the Government of India, which
feared that such courts would place an “unreasonable responsibility” on
military officers by asking them to undertake the responsibilities of civil
authorities. The Government of India also feared that such a measure
might invite attacks on troops by the revolutionaries, and subsequent
reprisals by soldiers. “If that did take place it might be exceedingly difficult
to control the soldiers,” a member of the Viceroy’s Council warned.125
Anderson was more successful in incorporating the military into other
spheres of the anti-terrorist campaign. In August 1932, Anderson and
General Sir Norman Macmullen, the recently appointed General Officer
Commanding-in-Chief Eastern Command, mutually agreed to station
additional British and Indian Army troops in Bengal. The Government of
Bengal suggested six battalions while the military authorities suggested
seven, or one brigade for both eastern and western Bengal. The original
plan was for troops to arrive at the beginning of November, but “the
probability of intensified terrorist activity” and fears of “a possible epi-
demic of outrages” led to a hasty deployment two months earlier.126 By
the end of the 1932, one British and four Indian Army battalions had been
stationed in Bengal to support the campaign against the revolutionaries, a
number later increased to seven.127
The militarization of the police in Bengal was particularly striking, as
Macmullen observed in 1932, “in a province where troops were rarely
seen.”128 Macmullen outlined three phases in which troops were to be
employed in Bengal: flag marches in which their role was “to move
152 M. SILVESTRI
freely about the districts”; the stationing of troops in localities where
information was collected; and a final phase where troops, together with
police, would be “engaged in active operations against terrorist organi-
zations.” Another army officer summarized these three phases as
“Demonstration, Discovery and Action.”129 During the “Demonstration”
phase, designed as an impressive display of colonial power with marches
and flag-saluting ceremonies whenever the column halted, troops were
to “maintain an attitude of complete indifference towards the local
inhabitants” that one officer described as a “compromise between frat-
ernizing and antagonism.”130
If the colonial authorities had hoped that displays of military power
would cow terrorists and inspire new flows of information to the police,
they were sorely disappointed. Chitforce had already demonstrated that
troop deployments did not necessarily lead to an increased flow of intelli-
gence. Civil and military officers observed that flag marches alone did little
to motivate rural Bengalis to provide information to the police; P. C.
Bamford of the Intelligence Bureau, a former Bengal Police intelligence
officer, believed that such displays of imperial patriotism actually increased
hatred for the Union flag.131 The District Magistrate of Midnapore
observed in 1933 that “there is a little room for doubt that the flag march
method is ineffective, serving neither to encourage loyalists nor to hamper
the movements of terrorists for any length of time.”132 Military command-
ers in turn continued to complain that the lack of police intelligence ham-
pered their effectiveness. In November 1932, Lt.-Col. Dennys of the
Presidency and Assam District complained that troops stationed in Bengal
were not given enough information about the reasons for the harassing
searches which they were asked to carry out. “The troops knew so little
about the information on which ‘civil’ worked: but the troops were defi-
nitely affected by it.” This was particularly an issue in Chittagong District,
where troops were called upon to do searches “night after night, and most
of them fruitless.” The CO of the battalion stationed there opined that “it
was doubtful where anyone but Gurkhas”—an epitome of the imperial
“martial races”—could have stood it without a loss of morale.”133
There was a broad consensus among colonial authorities in Bengal that
“the mere presence of troops,” although reassuring to colonial officials
and the European community, did not alone do much to improve the flow
of intelligence to the local police.134 Equally if not more important, in the
eyes of the Government of Bengal, was the use, beginning in 1932, of
British officers of British and Indian Army regiments as intelligence officers
in centers of revolutionary activity. The idea for the deployment of these

Military Intelligence Officers (MIOs) originated with military rather than
civilian authorities. General Norman Macmullen, hoping to avoid repeat-
ing the intelligence failures of the Burma Rebellion of 1930–1932, sought
to bolster the intelligence capabilities of the Bengal Police by utilizing
army officers to supplement the ranks of the District Intelligence Branches.
The first four officers arrived shortly after the first troops in the fall of
1932.135 The number of MIOs was increased to eight in 1934 and later to
twelve.136
Most, though not all, of those selected as Military Intelligence Officers
had backgrounds in intelligence, ranging from army courses to practical
experience in India and Burma.137 Their intelligence experience, or even
their military background, was not considered to be as important in their
effectiveness, however, as their status as British officers. Macmullen
emphasized imperial factors in the MIOs’ effectiveness: the officers’
Britishness, and their ability to command and direct Indian subordinates.
“The important point,” he stated in 1934 at a conference of civil and mili-
tary officials in Calcutta,
is not that they are Military, but that they are British and specially selected.
Any Britisher in control of your District Intelligence staff, provided he is of
the right type and has the necessary training, would produce just the same
results under the same conditions.138
The Commissioner of Chittagong Division agreed that a group of British

police officers could achieve similar results to the MIOs if they were given
proper training and freed from bureaucratic routine:
the value of the Military Intelligence Officer lies in the fact not that he is a
military officer, but that he is a British officer entirely untrammeled by office
and routine work, able to live out in the areas with which he is dealing, to
get into close contact with the people whom he has to frighten or encourage
and generally to inspire confidence in the officers from whom he has to
obtain results.139
Indeed, colonial authorities regarded this freedom to focus on intelli-

gence work as a key element of the MIOs’ success. Although they were
seconded to the Bengal Police with rank of additional superintendent and
worked within the structures of District Intelligence Branches under the
154 M. SILVESTRI
authority of district police superintendents, they were able to work exclu-

sively on cultivating agents, compiling dossiers on revolutionary suspects
and analyzing local revolutionary activities. One of the first MIOs, Captain
D. R. G. Leonard, who had served as an intelligence officer with Chitforce
from November 1931 to February 1932, considerably bolstered the
intelligence-gathering efforts of the Mymensingh DIB. Leonard person-
ally enlisted his own agents and supervised District Intelligence Officers in
“the enlistment of regular agents.” He also compiled information about
revolutionary groups into a “Black Book” which was taken as a model for
District Intelligence Branches in Bengal. District Superintendent S. G.
Taylor detailed how Leonard traveled throughout the district and sought
to cultivate relationships at the village level:
[He] organises anti-terrorist associations and other extensive propaganda

for the education of the public against terrorism. For this purpose he holds
meetings in the mufassal and personally explains to individuals how terror-
ism can, and should, be fought. He calls up parents and guardians of sus-
pects and, where there is no fear of the exposure of agents, tells them what
their wards have been doing and explains to them how to check the activities
of the latter.140
Similarly, the MIO in Rangpur District in northern Bengal greatly

expanded the intelligence archive of the local DIB, by opening a file on
anyone suspected of involvement with the revolutionary groups, even if
the individual was mentioned by only a single agent. The history sheets
maintained by the MIO provided the only reliable list of revolutionary
suspects in the district.141 The local superintendent reported that this was
an “excellent system and the Military Intelligence Officer derives great
benefit when touring or on occasions when action is necessary against the
groups as a whole.” No other officer, he noted, would have had the time
to maintain such an extensive filing system.142 During the elaborate secu-
rity precautions taken during the visit of the Governor of Bengal to
Rangpur in 1936, the MIO was also responsible in conjunction with
senior DIB officers for the positioning of plain-clothes policemen.143
MIOs were frequently stationed in rural areas of Bengal, where they
worked closely with Indian officers of District Intelligence Branches. In an
effort to apprehend remaining raiders following the capture of Surjya Sen
in 1933, MIO Captain Ivor Stevenson moved out of Chittagong town to
the interior where he lived with a number of DIB officers and men.
Stevenson and the DIB staff engaged in both propaganda and intelligence-
gathering regarding the revolutionaries’ movements.144 John Hunt, an
officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, served as an MIO in Bengal from
6 January 1934 to 3 April 1935. He recalled spending weeks without see-
ing another European, as he worked closely with Bengali subordinates in
the local DIB. The thrill of such clandestine operations was a major reason
for the appeal of MIO positions, which for Hunt offered a relief from the
“boredom and frustration” of serving in a British regiment in Calcutta in
the early 1930s:
For a young man with no experience of civil administration, scant knowl-

edge of the law, no training in covert operations and no previous contacts
with the people among whom I was to live and work, including the Indian
Army, this was an exciting new world, full of surprises, pitfalls and a certain
spice of danger.145
The Military Intelligence Officers thus stood as exemplars of the “indi-

vidualist myth that sustained colonial rule”: the lone imperial officer with
the ability to “know the country.”146 To be sure, the MIOs were under
civilian control, exemplifying one of the key tenets of post-Amritsar Indian
military policy, and some officers such as Hunt seem to have developed a
true affection for the people and the landscape of rural Bengal.147 Yet a
dramatic increase in military force lay behind the successes of these “lone
imperial officers.” In Chittagong and Midnapore Districts, where the rev-
olutionary campaign was most active, MIOs served as liaisons between
police and military.148 Macmullen emphasized that the Military Intelligence
Officers were “most necessary” for “intensive operations by the troops.”
“It must be realised,” he added, “that the use of troops under the special
Acts in force in Bengal differs from the normal use of the military in aid of
the civil power and closely resembles their use under Martial Law.”
Macmullen invoked Charles Gwynn’s recently published Imperial
Policing—written with a military rather than a police audience in mind—
as an illustration of this, suggesting that if one substituted “terrorists” and
“absconders” for “rebels” Gwynn’s discussion of martial law was “identi-
cal with rules now in force in parts of Bengal.”149
The effectiveness of the Military Intelligence Officers and of the Bengal
Intelligence Branch after 1930 thus depended on the presence of the
British and Indian Army in Bengal’s districts.150 This was illustrated an
episode from Mymensingh District in January 1934. While two companies
156 M. SILVESTRI
of the Norfolk Regiment camped in the Munshiganj subdivision of

Mymensingh, all suspected terrorists in the subdivision—some 300 men—
were brought in and interrogated by the Military Intelligence Officer and
DIB inspectors. The District Magistrate and Police Superintendent agreed
that the presence of the troops was responsible for securing a large num-
ber of agents for the police on this occasion.151
The “intelligence” efforts of these civil-military collaborations also not
infrequently involved the brutal treatment of revolutionary suspects and
those suspected of possessing information about terrorists. By the 1930s,
the Government of Bengal drew little distinction between the two.152 This
was illustrated in Chittagong District, where District Magistrate A. S.
Hands and MIO Ivor Stephenson developed a policy of calculated brutal-
ity in searches carried out in villages in the district. Under the Bengal
Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act of 1932, collective fines were
imposed on villages found to have harbored terrorist suspects. A collective
fine of Rs 80,000 was imposed on Chittagong town after the Parhartali
Railway Institute Raid, for example, but smaller fines were also routinely
levied for simply failing to supply information. In March 1933, a fine was
imposed on the village of Bidgram, near Chittagong town, when villagers
denied knowledge of one of the Armoury Raiders who was chased there
by two police officers.153
In May 1932, the Army and Police began a policy of “regular and per-
sistent searches” of all houses suspected to be used as shelters by Armoury
Raiders, and over the next year, an average of 100 dwellings per month
were searched. Hunt recalled the punitive nature of these searches:
Under the forceful leadership of the District Magistrate Adam Hands and
the MIO, Ivor Stephenson, the District was being subjected to a deliberate
programme of harassment by the battalion of the Additional Garrison. Raids
and searches in the villages were conducted by the troops, often acting on
little or no firm information, on the theory that the terrorists, if they were
not fortuitously caught in the cordon, would be driven into some other area
where our intelligence had improved.
Hunt noted the discomfort of some senior British police officers and in
particular the dislike of some Bengali subordinate officers with such “crude
methods of countering violence with violence,” which “were distasteful
and a matter of shame.”154 Nonetheless, the consensus among colonial
officials was that such searches were effective in increasing the flow of
intelligence in Chittagong. Prior to June 1932, according to A. J. Dash,

“Reliable specific information was so scanty that regular searches of pos-
sible shelters had to be undertaken in order to exert a vague general pres-
sure on absconders and their supporters.” The MIO, Stevenson, made
village Watch and Ward Committees “audiences for his propaganda,”
based on a combination of searches, fines, and “general harassment.” At
the same time, Stevenson used the information received to coordinate the
searches conducted by military troops. Behind this lay villagers’ fears of
British and Indian Army units:
Particular advantage is derived from the personal contact which Captain

Stevenson effects between the administration and responsible village opin-
ion. Leaders feel they are in the presence of an officer who is virtually in
charge of the direction of information and operations and who is in a posi-
tion to bring immediate punishment if they fail to carry out what he has
convinced them are reasonable requests for assistance.155
British observers credited the cooperation of the MIO and District

Magistrate as crucial in increasing the flow of information. Stevenson was
quickly awarded the Companion of the Indian Empire after only a six-
month posting in the police, much to the resentment of many Bengal
Police officers, who felt that he and other military officers were being
singled out for commendation at the expense of their police colleagues.156
Hands as well was credited for his willingness to go to great lengths to
produce intelligence. According to ICS officer Henry Twynam, he
had been very successful in obtaining secret agents and information. His
methods, although within the law, were unorthodox. As later in Malaya, the
villagers were more scared of the Terrorists than the Police, but Hands
evolved methods which made life so uncomfortable for non-cooperating
villagers that eventually informants began to talk and—as usually happens—
once information begins to come in, further interrogations and investiga-
tion help it to gather volume, like a snowball.157
While Military Intelligence Officers thus bolstered the capacity of the

Bengal Police IB to carry out effective intelligence work, the presence of
the British and Indian Army lay behind their successes in the realm of
“information,” “interrogations,” and “investigation” in the 1930s.
158 M. SILVESTRI
5 Reforming the Terrorist

By the mid-1930s, police confidence in their intelligence networks had
been restored, as troops became a regular presence in “disturbed” Bengal
districts and military officers became a presence among the police. At this
time, the Government of Bengal began to focus on additional strategies
for achieving their elusive goal of bringing three decades of “Bengali ter-
rorism” to an end. Colonial authorities sought to eradicate what regarded
as the core elements of the social, economic, and psychological issues
which intelligence officers believed central to the composition of the
“Bengali terrorist.” These, in essence, amounted to a sustained effort to
“reform” and rehabilitate Bengali revolutionaries. As Durba Ghosh has
shown, Indian colonial authorities had by this time come to define terror-
ism as antithetical to the process of political reform. Repression—in the
form of detention camps and emergency legislation—occurred in tandem
with reforms such as the Government of India Act.158 The individual
“Bengali terrorist” was also the subject of reform efforts, which as we will
see relied heavily upon elements of imperial culture and British concep-
tions of manliness, as well as stereotypes about Bengali Hindus.
One element at the core of British attitudes to Bengali revolutionaries
was the perception that they were not only misguided but malleable, and
thus candidates for transformation into loyal colonial subjects. Charles
Tegart expressed this view in 1932 in his lecture on “Terrorism in India,”
in which he argued that the revolutionary rank and file was composed
largely of youths with both physical and emotional weaknesses who had
been manipulated by their leaders. The Bengali, Tegart stated, drawing on
long-standing colonial stereotypes of Bengali Hindu “effeminacy”:
is an intensely sensitive and emotional being, endowed with generous

impulses. But he is easily led, quick to fancy insults and slights and quick to
respond to anything that ministers to his personal vanity. In the terrorist
movements his emotions once stirred found vent in misdirected patriotism.
He was flattered by finding his services so much in demand. He was inspired
by eulogies of the so-called heroes who had died for their country and
longed to emulate their example. He believed what he was told and had read
about the oppression and the arrogance of the Government, largely because
he never heard it contradicted.159
While the revolutionary leadership might be relegated to the category

of “irreconcilables,” the rank and file were potential projects for reform.
Intelligence officers—including, ironically, those singled out by revolu-

tionaries as practitioners of abuse and torture—took pride in their ability
to “turn” former terrorists. Fellow officers believed that Tegart’s Irish
background—“his characteristically Irish nature—gave him insight into
the “mind of the bomb- and pistol-wallah.”160 Tegart’s wife Kathleen
claimed that “among the large numbers of actual or potential terrorists
whom he converted, many not only abandoned their connection with out-
rages but voluntarily enlisted themselves to help the police in the preven-
tion of such crimes.” Indian intelligence officers such as Basanta Kumar
Chatterjee were also reputed to have the ability to make “good citizens”
out of former revolutionaries.161
Inspired by “the missionary zeal of the Church of Scotland,” John
Anderson also took an interest in reforming one of his would-be assassins,
Rabindra Banerji of Dacca District, who had attempted to shoot Anderson
at Lebong Racecourse in Darjeeling on 8 May 1934. Anderson commuted
Banerji’s capital sentence to fourteen years imprisonment in the Andaman
Islands. There, according to Anderson’s biographer, he “came under the
benign influence” of chaplain Cyril Pearson. The chaplain and Anderson
agreed that the youth was a “foolish lad” who was “not beyond redemp-
tion.” Anderson visited the young man in his cell in the Andamans in
1937, and subsequently granted him parole to study electrical engineering
in England. In a final development which must have been particularly
gratifying to former governor, not only did his would-be assassin enlist in
the R. A. F. during the Second World War but also converted to Christianity,
along with his Jewish wife.162
In addition to these individual attempts, the Government of Bengal
undertook collective efforts to alter the mentalities of young Bengalis that,
in their view, had led them to terrorism. Some of these measures focused
on practical efforts that attempted to provide former revolutionaries with
vocational and technical training, but others attempted to instill them with
imperial ideals of appropriate masculine behavior. The first efforts at
reform took place following the granting of amnesty in 1919 to revolu-
tionary suspects detained under the Defence of India Act. In the following
year, the Government of India and the Indian YMCA initiated a residen-
tial program for former detainees. Following a conversation between the
Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, and K. T. Paul of the YMCA Council,
Intelligence Branch DIG W. G. Dixon and the Political Secretary of the
Government of Bengal met with Paul and a representative of the Indian
Association to develop a program to assist former detenus. The goal was
160 M. SILVESTRI
twofold: to provide vocational training and establish an alternative to the

social and political world of the revolutionaries.163 The man selected to
head the program, R. O. Raha, an MA graduate of Calcutta University,
had no particular expertise regarding the revolutionary movement, but
had practiced law for several years and was considered to be familiar with
Indian criminality.
The scheme was initially funded by the YMCA, with contributions
from the Government of India, Government of Bengal, and small dona-
tions from Indians, including moderate nationalists such as Surendranath
Banerjee. Although Paul emphasized that no attempts at religious conver-
sion were to take place, there was a distinct moral tone to the enterprise,
which was to create a “ministry of friendship” with the goal of “establish-
ing confidence permanently in a healthy quarter to which one may turn
for advice and help in the long future.” Raha was aided by the nationalist
lawyer B. C. Chatterjee who supplied him with the initial names of former
detainees who were candidates for entry into the YMCA’s program.
Chatterjee’s participation was considered crucial to securing the support
of former revolutionaries for the program. Rana wrote that “Mr.
Chatterjee’s political past is a guarantee on which these men can rely, and
when he backs up the Hostel they feel that they can without prejudice go
there.” Chatterjee was also said to have helped to quash “vague but subtle
and dangerously adverse rumours” about the program.
By August 1920, 165 former detenus had resided at the hostel, which
soon moved to larger premises. In addition to vocational training in a
variety of fields ranging from motor driving and mechanics to telegraphy
and laboratory training, the hostel made efforts to provide the men with
“healthy recreations,” such as swimming, volleyball, and badminton. The
scheme was regarded to be a success, as the former detainees were consid-
ered to have embraced the YMCA hostel, taking a “jealous pride” in it and
responding to any criticism as a “personal insult.” Raha also opined that
the YMCA’s work had a “soothing effect” on the political situation, with
the “outer fringe” of the former detainees “settled in life,” and the “inner
ring … gained over to constitutional ways.”
Following the mass detention of thousands of suspected revolutionaries
in the early 1930s, the Government of Bengal began a program to train
selected detenus in “agricultural and technical occupations.” Colonial
authorities hoped that such vocational training would not only “accelerate
the release of detenus and thus … counteract public opinion against the
policy of long detention,” but also could eventually be applied to
nemployed young Bengalis more generally.164 ICS officer S. C. Mitter,

u
Director of Industries of Bengal and one of the highest-ranking Indian
members of the Bengal government, developed the training scheme with
the endorsement of John Anderson. District magistrates recommended
detenus who had been in home or village detention.165 Four training
camps were established in January 1936 to train detenus in kitchen gar-
dening; brass, bell-metal and cutlery making; pottery; and umbrella-mak-
ing. A fifth opened in the following year to train detenus in button-making.
Three agricultural camps were also established at the end of 1935. With
space for fewer than 200, the capacity of the camps was small, particularly
in comparison with the tremendous expansion of detention camps for
political prisoners, where around 2500 detenus were held at a time in the
first half of the 1930s.166
In addition to vocational training for select detenus, the Government
of Bengal made broader efforts to deter young Bengalis from involvement
with revolutionary groups. These schemes drew heavily on both colonial
stereotypes of the “effeminate Bengali” and British imperial ideals regard-
ing sport and masculinity. The reform efforts aimed to make supposedly
weak, emotional, and effeminate colonial subjects into something akin to
the ideal of British imperial masculinity. Or as Anderson’s private secretary
put it, to give “the Bengali boy a healthier physique and a healthier out-
look on life … to make him the kind of young man who … would punch
you on the nose instead of stabbing you in the back!”167
An important component of this reform effort was the attempt to foster
participation in “healthy” European sports by Bengali Hindu youth.
Although European sports played an important role as agents of angliciza-
tion and cultural imperialism within the British Empire, they also became
a venue for the construction of “alternative athletic masculinities.”168 The
Bengal revolutionary groups, who fostered an emphasis on physical cul-
ture and “traditional” Indian sports such as lathi play in attempts to build
both the physique and character of young Bengali men were a notable
example of this. European sport competitions also became a contested
realm in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal, as football
tournaments were one of the few mixed public spheres in the racially seg-
regated city of Calcutta.169
The Indian Police, in common with other colonial police and military
forces, was also thoroughly imbued with an ethos of sport as a way of cul-
tivating and maintaining loyalty and discipline.170 Police superintendent
P. E. S. Finney, later an intelligence officer and supervisor of the Deoli
162 M. SILVESTRI
detention camp, had a typically enthusiastic attitude toward sport. While

superintendent at Mymensingh District in the mid-1930s, Finney gave
preference to armed police recruits who were skilled at football and
hockey, and accepted a few recruits from the district—not normally con-
sidered reliably “martial” material—who were “good footballers.”171 In
1930, Finney persuaded local Bengali football teams who were boycotting
British-organized leagues to compete in a tournament with British teams
(including those organized from the local police) that became known, to
his great pleasure, as the “Finney Shield.”172 District police participated
intensely in drill, hockey, and soccer in various “shield” competitions, one
of which was named for F. J. Lowman, the Inspector General of the Bengal
Police who was one of the revolutionaries’ victims. Football pitches,
cricket grounds and golf courses also became venues for revolutionaries’
assassination attempts against police and other colonial officials. Khan
Bahadur Ahsanullah and B. E. J. Burge, the third of the three Midnapore
district magistrates assassinated by the revolutionaries, were both shot
dead at football matches.
In the mid-1930s, the Government of Bengal made a number of efforts
to prevent Bengali youth from being attracted to terrorist groups and
practicing “Indian” sports such as lathi play through competing programs
of sport, athletic competitions, and scouting. Much of the impetus for this
came from Military Intelligence Officers. John Hunt, for example,
“embarked on a constructive program among the young people” when he
was stationed in Noakhali District in Eastern Bengal in the 1930s. Hunt
“instituted a scheme of house captains and games competitions within the
school, culminating in District championships, and it was found that a
politically active character could often be transformed simply by giving
him responsibility.” A similar program was adopted by the District
Magistrate in Midnapore.173 Military, police, and civil service officers
developed a number of similar programs in other districts, and from 1935
the military commander in Bengal, Major George Lindsay, began to spon-
sor such schemes as well.174
One of the most ambitious of these programs was developed by the
Military Intelligence Officer and District Magistrate in the north Bengal
district of Rangpur in 1935. According to District Magistrate S. K. Ghosh,
the goal was “to catch the boys young and … get them inculcated in ways
which will not only appeal to them, but will gradually help to build up
their character, making them more robust and manly with less inclination
for crooked and underhand things.” The schemes in Rangpur focused on
two main areas: Boy Scouts and “physical culture including boxing,”
which were to inculcate the “games ethic” and sportsmanship:
In order to counteract the lathi and dagger playing which is made such a
feature of most “samitis” (which are probably all more or less terrorist orga-
nizations) we intend to lay very great emphasis on teaching of boxing, as
this game makes for the development of physical and mental qualities which
lathi and dagger playing do not touch at all. The Bengali boy with his phy-
sique and quickness of eye and movement should do very well at this game
and it is not unlikely that he will do even better when he realises that in time
he may represent India in the Olympic games at this game.175
The Military Intelligence Officer in Rangpur distributed instructions to

institute a “house system” in all Higher English schools in the district, as
well as rules for games such as netball and a game known as “Hindusthan
ball.” In September 1935, a ten-day physical training course was held for
masters of selected schools. The masters were taught instruction in various
games including football, boxing, wrestling, volleyball and basketball, and
received lectures from the District Military Intelligence Officer on subjects
such as “Terrorism in Schools” and “The House System.” Local officials
were ecstatic at the results, noting that local boys reported that revolu-
tionaries had attempted to offer them “literature of a dangerous kind,”
while in one case a boy obtained “all the up-to-date cypher systems of the
various revolutionary parties” and turned them in to the Military
Intelligence Officer.176
In addition to the efforts to replicate the sporting ethos of British pub-
lic schools, the Government of Bengal also utilized youth and cultural
organizations in an effort to blunt the appeal of “Bengali terrorism” to
bhadralok youth in the towns and villages of Bengal. Tegart, then a mem-
ber of the Council of India, in conjunction with Dr. D. M. Maitra, the
founder of the Bengal Social Service League, advocated adapting the
Czechoslovakian Sokol movement, which emphasized a combination of
physical exercise and cultural and educational uplift.177 The Government
of Bengal ultimately turned to two organizations, the Boy Scouts and a
Bengali folk organization known as the Bratachari movement, in an effort
to promote values that would inculcate loyalty to the Empire.
Like sports, scouting was a contested realm in colonial India, and colo-
nial authorities were initially suspicious of its potential for building sup-
port for nationalism among Indian youth. Prior to the Great War, the
164 M. SILVESTRI
Government of India encouraged the formation of scout troops among

Europeans and Eurasians, but not Indians. In 1912, the Viceroy Lord
Hardinge expressed the fear that if scouting were placed under the control
of Indian officials it “might very soon develop into a political and semi-
military movement” along the lines of the Bengali samitis.178 By the inter-
war era, however, Indian demand for scouting had grown considerably,
and the Government of India in response sought to actively attempted to
utilize the scouting movement as a tool to combat the influence of Indian
nationalism. In 1921, R. S. S. Baden-Powell came to India to coordinate
the development of scouting, and an All India Council for Scouts was
formed with the Viceroy as the Chief Scout of India.179
Indian Scout organizations, while drawing heavily on Baden-Powell’s
conception, nonetheless differed markedly from his vision of Scouting as
an organization binding the youth of the Empire together. Indian scout-
ing organizations such as the Seva Samiti Boy Scouts Association had
strong links to the Indian National Congress and to Indian nationalism
more generally.180 In 1937, the Government of Bengal expressed concern
about the inclusion in the second edition of Scouting for Boys in India of
lines from “Vande Mataram” because of their connection to the Bengali
revolutionary movement. A Bengal government official explained to
Baden-Powell the context of the song in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s
novel Anandamath and how “the leaders of the Bengal revolutionary
societies borrowed many ideas from this novel,” including the system of
vows. They informed him that “‘Vande Mataram’ has been literally the
war cry of the terrorists in Bengal.” As a result, Baden-Powell agreed to
remove the words to “Bande Mataram” from next edition.181
Nonetheless, by the early 1930s, British police superintendents and dis-
trict magistrates were actively promoting scouting as a way to thwart
recruitment to the revolutionary groups. The wife of superintendent S. G.
Taylor in the Kishoreganj subdivision of Mymensingh District in eastern
Bengal wrote that officers there were
pushing the Boy Scout movement as hard as they can as they find it is taking
on like anything and is probably going to help the anti-terrorist movement
more than any one realises. The people in the Town have taken it up like
anything, and not only fathers of young families, but even grandfathers,
have become Rovers. We attended a bonfire jamboree last night and were
given the proper yells. Most enthusiastic they were.182
By 1935, the Government of Bengal had granted the Boy Scouts a 6000-
rupee annual subsidy, and Military Intelligence Officers had also begun to
promote scouting. In 1938 the Government of Bengal praised the perfor-
mance of MIOs “whose keenness and success in giving life to such activi-
ties as the Scout and Bratachari movement and the House System help to
keep students from being over-interested in politics.”183
The other organization promoted by the Government of Bengal, the
Bratachari movement, has been aptly described by John Rosselli as “a
high-minded Scout-type movement dedicated to the cult of past Bengali
glories, sports, and folk arts.”184 Although the ostensible purpose was a
revival of Bengali folk traditions, like many colonial institutions, Bratachari
blended “Indian” and Western influences.185 The movement’s founder,
ICS officer G. S. Dutt, later wrote that the inspiration for Bratachari came
to him while in England in 1929, where he attended the All-England Folk
Dance festival at the Royal Albert Hall. He was struck by the similarity
between English folk dances and “the simple village dances of rural Bengal
in which I had participated in my childhood.” Dutt began to work to
preserve the traditional folk dance forms of Bengal and incorporate them
into an educational program.186 The Bratachari movement was formally
established in 1934, with Dutt as its first president. In 1940, Ramananda
Chatterji, the editor of the Modern Review of Calcutta, estimated that
seventeen of the twenty-seven Bengal districts had established Bratachari
samitis with over 100,000 total members.187
The movement in part responded to Bengali concerns about the loss of
“martial” prowess among her sons under colonial rule. In a 1934 collec-
tion of songs, Dutt set two songs to the tune of “It’s a Long Way to
Tipperary,” partly “on the grounds that it was good for marching … and
had been sung by soldiers under fire.”188 Among the dances practiced by
Bratacharis was one known as “Raibenshe,” which Dutt claimed to have
“discovered among the descendants of the old fighting castes in the dis-
tricts of Western Bengal,” and which he described as “one of the manliest
and most vigorous folk dances extant in any country in the world.”
Rabindranath Tagore also praised the “manly” Raibenshe dance and
expressed confidence that it would “remove the feebleness of spirit of our
country.”189
The movement was appealing for a number of reasons to colonial
authorities seeking an outlet for the energies of Bengali youth other than
terrorism or nationalist politics. Although Dutt described the movement
as “a national movement for an ideal and practice of the citizenship of
166 M. SILVESTRI
Bengal,” its focus was cultural synthesis rather than opposition between
Indian and western culture. According to Dutt, while Bratachari was
“based primarily on the national culture of Bengal from which it seeks its
basic inspiration, it does not inculcate a narrow nationalism which can see
no good in other people’s culture. On the other hand, it is willing to
assimilate all that is best in other people’s culture.” The “traditional”
games and dances of the movement were a far cry from the martial lathi
and dagger play of the revolutionary samitis. “Unlike modern sports and
games,” Dutt observed, “which tend to encourage the combative and
competitive spirit, the Bratachari exercises and dances actively develop the
spirit of harmony and co-operation.”190
In 1935, Anderson expressed the belief that the Bratachari movement
would “prove of real value in correcting undesirable tendencies in the
youth of Bengal,” and it was granted an initial annual subsidy of 2400
rupees. ICS officer S. Basu wrote that Bratachari would direct the energies
of young Bengalis “to channels of social service and healthy forms of
sports…. By granting it subsidy Government will be able to exercise strict
control and supervision over the movement and thus they will be able to
direct it on [the] right lines.”191 At a Bratachari rally in January 1937,
Anderson was struck by “the excellent physique of those who took part in
the Bratachari display.”192 The headmaster of one high school praised the
“chastening influence” of the Bratachari movement on his students, a
description similar to those voiced by colonial officials who hoped to influ-
ence teenage Bengali boys who might otherwise have been interested in
terrorist recruiters:
A pupil, who, before joining the Bratachari movement, unruly and hot-
tempered and in many respects very ill-equipped for life, has proved himself
worthy of the highest admiration since he has become initiated in the noble
principles of this movement. The movement is unequaled in molding char-
acter. My own son, a lad of fifteen, is a remarkable instance. Eight months
ago, before the movement came into operation, the boy was mischievous,
wayward and most irregular in habits. But now, as Headmaster and father of
the boy, I feel proud to say that since becoming a Bratachari he has set an
example for others to emulate; he is not only methodical and earnest, but
always wears a smile on his face and has been doing constructive work.193
The deployment of military forces and the use of special legislation allow-
ing widespread detention without trial enabled the Government of Bengal
to disrupt the revolutionary offensive in the 1930s. In the blunt words of

John Anderson’s biographer, “There was to be no more ‘cat and mouse’
treatment. They meant to crush terrorism permanently.”194 Yet colonial
authorities also redoubled efforts to “reform” revolutionaries through
vocational training, sport, scouting, and cultural movements which they
hoped would transform “Bengali terrorists” into loyal imperial subjects.
* * *
After the Chittagong Armoury Raid widened the field of activity for
Bengali revolutionaries and presented new challenges to colonial authority
in Bengal, the colonial state was forced to find new means of suppressing
the revolutionary movement as it entered its third decade. A new Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act again gave Bengal authorities to power to
institute the mass detention without trial of revolutionary suspects. The
Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act of 1932 further targeted
districts of the province where the Bengal revolutionaries’ campaign was
most intense. In addition to allowing the levying of collective fines, this
legislation also targeted Hindu bhadralok youth, who made up the major-
ity of the ranks of revolutionaries. In Midnapore and Chittagong Districts,
Hindu boys and men between the ages of twelve and thirty had to carry
identity cards, were placed under dusk to dawn curfews, and prohibited
from using bicycles.195 A network of detention camps was created to house
the detainees. The Bengal Police Intelligence Branch made efforts to bol-
ster its ranks in Calcutta and the districts, and place the search for the
“absconders” in Chittagong under the direct supervision of senior
police officers.
Yet colonial authorities found that a cadre of British and Indian intelli-
gence officers and legislation allowing wide latitude to detain suspects
were no longer adequate to prevent the revolutionary movement from not
only sustaining itself but also growing even more powerful and attracting
a new generation of recruits. While the campaign against the revolutionar-
ies had been conducted as a police matter for over two decades, the mili-
tary played a prominent role not only in reasserting colonial power but
also in the generation of intelligence that formed the basis of hundreds of
search operations directed at the revolutionaries. The militarization of the
anti-revolutionary campaign, and the ways that the coercive actions of
police, military, and special legislation together accentuated the repressive
168 M. SILVESTRI
apparatus of the colonial state, is perhaps the most striking feature of the
anti-terrorist campaign in Bengal during these years.
As military-civil anti-terrorist operations began to reassert colonial con-
trol and built a renewed, if fragile, sense of confidence among the British-
Indian community, a range of measures were deployed to alter what
colonial authorities viewed as the mindsets behind “Bengali terrorism.”
While colonial officials made many optimistic statements regarding the
success of the military-civil campaign and efforts to reform and rehabili-
tate bhadralok youth, the revival of the terrorist campaign remained an
obsession with colonial authorities—and a fear of the British-Indian popu-
lation—until the end of the colonial rule. Both colonial officials and mem-
bers of the British-Indian community feared the transfer of the police to
provincial ministries under the 1935 Government of India Act. Many
strongly argued that the Intelligence Branch, because of its importance in
the continuing surveillance of “Bengali terrorists,” ought to be separated
from the ordinary police and retained under British control.196 Anxieties
about the potential for terrorist violence thus remained considerable, in
spite of the weight of colonial power that was brought to bear upon the
revolutionaries.
By the 1930s, colonial authorities in Bengal were also deeply concerned
about the influence of revolutionaries outside of India and efforts to
import arms to revolutionaries in the province. The activities of some of
the most prominent Bengali revolutionaries overseas and their efforts to
import arms and otherwise assist their colleagues in Bengal, and the
actions of imperial intelligence agencies in London, New Delhi, and
Calcutta to neutralize such activities form the subject of the next
two chapters.

London
CS Chief Secretary
University

IO India Office
NA UK National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, London
Pol Political
Sec. Secretary
Tegart memoir K. F. Tegart, “Charles Tegart of the Indian Police,” MSS
Eur. C 235, APAC BL
Bengal, 1995)
Notes
1. Michele L. Louro and Carolien Stolte, “The Meerut Conspiracy Case in
Comparative and International Perspective,” Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33: 3 (2013), 310–315.
2. Kama Maclean, “The History of a Legend: Accounting for Popular
Histories of Revolutionary Nationalism in India,” Modern Asian Studies
46: 6 (2012), 1540–1571.
3. H. W. Hale, Terrorism in India 1917–1936 (1937; Reprint: Delhi: Deep,
1974).
4. Extracts from Weekly Report of Director, Intelligence Bureau, GOI, 14
December 1930, L/P&J/12/389, APAC BL.
5. Another group of insurgents, who had planned to shoot Britons at the
local European Club, were frustrated in their attempt. The club was
empty, except for an Indian bearer, due to the fact that the raid took place
late on the evening of Good Friday. The account of the Armoury Raid
here is, unless otherwise noted, based on information in Manini
Chatterjee, Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930–34 (Delhi:
Penguin, 1999); and R. E. A. Ray, “Report on the Activities of Terrorists
170 M. SILVESTRI
in Bengal during the Period April to December 1930,” (1931) in TIB I:

593–758.
6. The revolutionaries who took control of the police armory also neglected
to send reinforcements to the group who had seized the Auxiliary Force
armory, which contained rifles and Lewis guns. In addition, revolutionar-
ies who could have taken over other key locales in the town wasted hours
at the police armory until, lacking other orders, they retreated to the hills
around Chittagong.
7. “Report of the Adjutant, A. B. Railways. Report of the Raid on the night
18th/19th April 1930,” in I. Mallikarjuna Sharma, ed., Easter Rebellion
in India: The Chittagong Uprising (Hyderabad: Marxist Study Forum,
1993), 391.
8. R. E. A. Ray, “Report on the Activities of Terrorists in Bengal during the
(1932) in TIB I: 745.
11. Robert Reid, Years of Change in Bengal and Assam (London: Ernest
Benn, 1966), 53.
12. Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence,
2015).
14. Report on the Political Situation in Bengal, First Half of May 1930,
15. Hale, Terrorism in India, 34.
16. Extracts from the Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau,
GOI, 17 December 1931, L/P&J/12/391, APAC BL. For the perspec-
tives of female revolutionaries, see Durba Ghosh, “Revolutionary Women
and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s,” Gender & History
25: 2 (2013), 355–375.
17. “Addenda to the List of Outrages,” in TIB VI: 667–701.
18. Charles Tegart was again the target of the Writers’ Building attack. For
details, see TIB VI: 667–701.
19. L. G. Pinnell, “Political and Administrative,” Pinnell Papers, MSS Eur. D
911/21, APAC BL.
20. The colonial debates surrounding and the application of the Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance of 1924 and the Bengal Criminal
Law Amendment Acts of 1925 and 1930 are analyzed in Durba Ghosh,
Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India,
1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 107–134

and 145–160. The focus here will be on the intersection between police
intelligence and preventive detention.
21. In 1926, the Governor of Bengal wrote to the Viceroy that Calcutta
Police Commissioner Charles Tegart “urged very strongly the moral
effect of a permanent measure.” Three years later the police again con-
veyed the view that the legislation ought to remain permanent. Hugh
Stephenson, Acting Governor of Bengal, to Viceroy, 9 August 1926, L/
PO/6/25 APAC BL; and “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in
Bengal 1905–1933,” (1933) in TIB I: 813.
22. The GOB estimated that “75 per cent. of the men arrested had at one
stage or another given their full story.” Hugh Stephenson, Acting
Governor of Bengal, to Viceroy, 9 August 1926, L/PO/6/25 APAC BL.
23. Hugh Stephenson, Acting Governor of Bengal, to Viceroy, 9 August
1926, L/PO/6/25 APAC BL.
24. “Terrorist Conspiracy in Bengal from the 1st January to 30th June 1926”
(1926), “Terrorist Conspiracy in Bengal from the 1st July to 31st
December 1926,” (1927), and “Terrorist Conspiracy in Bengal from the
1st January to 30th June 1927,” (1928) in TIB I: 477–592.
25. Calcutta Police Commissioner Charles Tegart regarded Chittagong and
Dacca as the two districts which posed the greatest threat of terrorist
violence. Lord Irwin, Viceroy, to Lord Birkenhead, Sec. of State for
India, Private, 16 June 1927, L/PO/6/25, APAC BL.
31; and Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal,
1875–1927 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 298–299 and 301.
27. “Activities of the Revolutionaries in Bengal from 1st September 1924 to
the 31st March 1925,” (1925) in TIB I: 375.
28. Chatterjee, Do and Die, 62–63.
30. Cited in Chatterjee, Do and Die, 64.
31. “Judgment in Armoury Raid Case No. 1 of 1930. Chittagong. In the
Court of the Commissioner of Special Tribunal. The Emperor v. Subodh
Bose and others,” 12–13, 1 March 1932, GOI Home (Pol) 7/4 of 1932,
NAI.
33. “Judgment in Emperor v. Surjya Kumar Sen, alias Masterda; Tarakeswar
Dastidar; Kalpana Datta,” p. 19, 14 August 1933, Sharpe Papers, CSAS.
34. Douglas Gordon, “Memoirs of Life as a Police Officer in India from
1907–59,” 111, Gordon Papers, CSAS.
172 M. SILVESTRI
35. “The watchers,” as Manini Chatterjee observes, “were no skillful detec-

tives, stalking their quarry in shadowy silence. They openly hung about
the listed ‘haunts,’ making no effort to conceal that they were on duty.”
Chatterjee, Do and Die, 64.
37. Cited in Chatterjee, Do and Die, 159.
38. Extract from diaries of W. D. R. Prentice, 13 and 15 May 1930, and note
by Prentice, 16 May 1930, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 580 of 1930,
WBSA.
39. J. C. Farmer, DIG, Backergunge Range, to F. Lowman, IG, 6 May 1930,
GOI Home (Poll) No. 335 of 1930, NAI.
40. Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics
1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 199.
41. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983),
301–302.
42. “List of Outrages Committed in Pursuance of the Civil Disobedience
Movement in 1930,” in TIB VI: 701–714.
43. J. R. Johnson, SP Chittagong, to A. H. Kemm, DM Chittagong, 24
August 1931, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 296 (76–80) of 1931, WBSA.
44. H. R Wilkinson, DM Chittagong, to GOB, 30 July 1930, GOB Home
45. Commander, Presidency and Assam District, to CS to GOB, 16 May
1930, in Sharma, ed., Easter Rebellion in India, 430–433.
46. Dallas Smith to Lowman, 4 May 1930, GOI Home (Pol) Conf. No. 335
of 1930, NAI.
47. Dallas Smith requested a plane, “bomber for choice,” which he believed
would be invaluable E. Dallas Smith, Commanding Special Duty
Detachment, Eastern Frontier Rifles, to Commandant, EFR, 21 April
1930, in Sharma, ed., Easter Rebellion in India, 396–397.
48. Report on the Political Situation in Bengal, Second Half of April 1930,
L/P&J/12/13, APAC BL; and Lt.-Col. E. Dallas Smith, Assam Rifles,
to Lowman, IG Police; and J. R. Johnson to Lowman; IG Police, Home
(Pol) Conf. No. 335 of 1930, NAI.
49. E. Dallas Smith to Lowman, 6 May 1930; and J. C. Farmer to Lowman,
6 May 1930; GOI Home (Pol) No. 335 of 1930, NAI.
50. Tanika Sarkar, Bengal 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 150 and 152–153.
51. Farmer to Lowman, 6 May 1930, GOI Home (Pol) 335 of 1930, NAI;
and Santimoy Roy, The Revolutionary Nationalist Movement: Its
Contribution to India’s Freedom Struggle (Calcutta: Antaranga Prakashana,
1993), 175–176.
52. J. R. Johnson, SP Chittagong, to Farmer, IG, 9 April 1931; and A. H.
Kemm, DM, to Commissioner, Chittagong Division, 14 April 1931;
GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 296 of 1931, WBSA.
53. H. W. Emerson, “Note on Discussion with Bengal Government,” 5
November 1931, P&J No. 5172 of 1931, L/P&J/7/242, APAC BL.
54. G. C. B. Buckland, Lt.-Col., Commanding at Chittagong, to O/C
Presidency & Assam District, 8 May 1931, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No.
296 of 1931, WBSA.
55. Emphasis in original. J. R. Johnson, SP, Chittagong, to T. J. A. Craig, IG,
25 August 1931, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 296 of 1931, WBSA.
56. Fortnightly Report for the Second Half of August 1931, L/P&J/12/25,
APAC BL.
57. See Chap. 3.
58. R. N. Reid, CS GOB, to Sec. GOI Home, 2 October 1931; A. H. Kemm,
DM Chittagong, to Commissioner, Chittagong Division, 1 September
1931; Reid to Sec. to GOI, Home, 2 October 1931; and W. H. Nelson,
Report on the Disturbances in Chittagong on August 30th, 1931 and
Following Days (1931), 19. P&J No. 4741 of 1931, L/P&J/7/220,
APAC BL.
59. Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905–1947 (Delhi: Oxford
60. Report of the Non-official Enquiry Committee on Recent Disturbances in
Chittagong (September, 1931), 10. P&J No. 4741 of 1931, L/P&J/7/220,
APAC BL.
61. Report on the Disturbances in Chittagong, 3–4; Report of the Non-official
Enquiry Committee on Recent Disturbances in Chittagong (September,
1931), 2; J. R. Johnson, SP, Chittagong, to T. J. A. Craig, IG, 25 August
1931, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 296 of 1931, WBSA. Emphasis in
original. Johnson concluded that “every young Bengali at the moment is
a potential murderer and only requires the necessary amount of the serum
propagated by PANCHAJANYA to go to Surjya Sen and get the plan for
murder.”
62. Report on the Disturbances in Chittagong, 28.
63. CS to GOB to GOI, Home, 23 January 1932, P&J No. 4741 of 1931,
64. CS to GOB to GOI, Home, 23 January 1932, and “Extracts from Note”
attached to the above letter, P&J No. 4741 of 1931, L/P&J/7/220,
APAC BL.
65. ICS officer John Younie reported that Shooter’s home leave had been
abruptly cancelled shortly before his suicide. Dorothy Younie, “In
Chittagong Fifty Years Ago,” Aberdeen University Review No. 169
(1983), 35–36.
174 M. SILVESTRI
66. David Campion, “Authority, Accountability and Representation: The

United Provinces Police and the Dilemmas of the Colonial Policeman in
British India, 1902–39,” Historical Research 76: 192 (2003), 221; and
telegram from GOI Home to Sec. of State, 20 March 1932, P&J No.
4741 of 1931, L/P&J/7/220, APAC BL.
67. In March 1932 the troops were replaced by a single battalion of Gurkha
Rifles. Major A. F. Rawson Lumby, Assistant Sec. to GOI, to Chief of
General Staff, 15 August 1932, GOI Home (Pol) No. 33/9 of 1932,
NAI.
68. Reid to CS to GOB, 14 December 1931, L/P&J/7/242, APAC BL.
69. Reid to CS to GOB, 14 December 1931, L/P&J/7/242, APAC BL.
70. A. S. Hands, “Report on the Operations of Chitforce from the 1st
December to 7th March 1932,” L/P&J/7/242, APAC BL.
71. Holman recalled that “In due course sensible strategy brought some
results. By sensible strategy I mean the old method of, for instance,
combing all parts of a given area thoroughly save one. We then went over
the deliberately neglected areas in the hope that its apparent immunity
from searches had lured in some absconders. It was to work at least once,
taking time and many men. In case it all sounds a very expensive way of
capturing a few frightened young men it should be mentioned that it was
considered essential to recover every one of the stolen arms.” T. G.
H. Holman memoirs, 178–179, Holman Papers, MSS Eur. D 884, APAC
BL.
72. Minute by R. Peel, IO, 11 March 1932, P&J No. 4741 of 1931,
73. E. N. Blandy, Commissioner, Chittagong Division, to Officer
Commanding, 7th (Dehra Dun) Infantry Brigade, Dacca, 16 May 1934,
GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 277 of 1934, WBSA. An estimated one
thousand searches were carried out between May 1932 and February
1933 alone. IO Judicial & Public Minute, 18 May 1933, L/P&J/7/242,
APAC BL. The Chitforce operation claimed credit for the arrest of a
“minor absconder” in Dacca in December 1931, due to the pressure that
was being brought to bear by revolutionaries in Chittagong. Reid to CS
to GOB, 21 December 1931, Weekly Report for Week Ending 19
December 1931, L/P&J/7/242, APAC BL.
74. A. S. Hands, “Report on the Operations against Absconders and Terrorists
in the Chittagong District from the 9th March 1932 to 31st March
1933,” p. 3, P&J No. 4741 of 1931, L/P&J/7/242, APAC BL. For the
Dhalghat raid, see Chatterjee, Do and Die, 211–215.
76. Extracts from the Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau,
GOI, 6 October 1932, L/P&J/12/391, APAC BL.

78. Maria Misra, Business, Race, and Politics in British India c. 1850–1960
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 164.
79. Ray, Social Conflict, 25.
80. David Washbrook, “Avatars of Identity: The British Community in
India,” in Robert Bickers, ed., Settlers and Expatriates: Britons Over the
Seas. The Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 203.
81. Kim A. Wagner, “’Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’ Motif and
Colonial Anxieties in British India,” Past and Present No. 218 (2013),
159–197.
82. In 1908, following a series of assassination attempts, the British-Indian
community demanded legislation enabling the colonial government to
deal with “revolutionary crime” outside the courts system. Ray, Social
Conflict, 181.
period April to December 1930,” (1931) in TIB I: 604.
84. As Mrinalini Sinha argues, the clubs of colonial India were not metropoli-
tan imports, but evolved and functioned in response to the exigencies of
the colonial world. “Britishness, Clubability and the Colonial Public
Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India,”
Journal of British Studies 40: 4 (2001), 489–521.
85. “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal 1905–1933,”
(1933) in TIB I: 821.
86. Kama Maclean, “The Art of Panicking Quietly: British-Indian Responses
to ‘Outrages,’ 1928–1933,” in Harald Fischer-Tiné, ed., Anxieties, Fear
and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 140.
87. Harald Fischer-Tiné and Christina Whyte, “Introduction: Empires and
Emotions,” in Fischer-Tiné, ed., Anxieties, Fear and Panic, 1.
88. A. S. Hands, Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinance Weekly Report No.
13, for week ending 27 February 1932, 28 February 1932, L/P&J/7/242,
APAC BL.
89. Amy Bell, “Landscapes of Fear: Wartime London, 1939–1945,” Journal
of British Studies 48: 1 (2009), 154.
90. Wagner, “’Treading Upon Fires,’” 159–197. For recurrent British fears
of a repeat of 1857, see Chap. 2.
(1932) in TIB I: 745.
92. Younie, “In Chittagong,” 27.
176 M. SILVESTRI
93. David M. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of
Regional Nationalism in India, 1905–1942 (Calcutta: Firma KLM,
1975), 79.
94. Alfred Watson, “Terror in Bengal,” in Wilfred Hindle, ed., We Were
There: By 12 Foreign Correspondents (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1939), 236.
95. H. Quinton, “Terrorism in Bengal – A Memory,” Quinton Collection,
CSAS.
96. Coralie Taylor to her parents, 11 September 1933 and 7 November
1933, S. G. Taylor Collection, CSAS.
Historical Journal 56: 1 (2013), 233–234 and 255–256.
98. Statesman, 1 August 1931, quoted in Reginald Reynolds, The White
Sahibs in India (1937; reprint Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970),
249.
99. H. W. Emerson, “Notes on Discussion with the Bengal Government,” 5
November 1931, L/P&J/7/242, APAC BL.
100. The Times, 15 December 1931.
101. Andrew Thompson, “The Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa, c.
1870–1939,” English Historical Review 118: 477 (2003), 617–650.
102. “The Royalists. We stand for the King against the King’s Enemies,”
[1931], Mullock Collection, CSAS.
103. “The Royalists. We stand for the King against the King’s Enemies,”
[1931], Mullock Collection, CSAS.
104. The Times, 15 December 1931. Mullock, along with two other members
of the Royalists, had in fact been present at the assassination attempt on
Villiers. Garlick had been part of the Special Tribunal which had tried and
sentenced Dinesh Gupta to death for the murder of the IG of Jails during
the attack on the Writers’ Building.
105. Extract from the Weekly Report of Director, Intelligence Bureau, GOI,
29 October 1931, L/P&J/12/390, APAC BL.
106. Royalist manifesto, 28 October 1931, Mullock Collection, CSAS.
107. Report on the Disturbances in Chittagong, 5. The Indian National
Congress’ Report of the Non-official Enquiry Committee also noted the
participation of Auxiliary Force members in the destruction of the press.
108. Untitled memorandum to Government of Bengal from European offi-
cials in Dacca [1932], S. G. Taylor Collection, CSAS.
109. Reflecting the fears of assassination by revolutionaries, the authors con-
tended that “In the peculiar condition of Hindu joint family life, it is
practically impossible for parents and relatives to be unaware of the revo-
lutionary activities of members of their household, particularly in those
cases where revolvers have been kept in the house.” Untitled memoran-
dum to Government of Bengal from European officials in Dacca [1932],
S. G. Taylor Collection, CSAS.
110. Mark Condos, “License to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the
Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867–1925,” Modern Asian Studies 50: 2
(2016), 480–481. For other efforts to apply the Murderous Outrages Act
to Bengal, see Chap. 2.
111. R. N. Reid, untitled memo, 24 March 1932; and Reid to Prentice, 24
March 1932, Anderson Collection, MSS Eur. F 207/12, APAC BL.
112. Reid to Prentice, 24 March 1932, Anderson Collection, MSS Eur.
F 207/12, APAC BL.
113. John Lonsdale, “Kenya: Home County and African Frontier,” in Bickers,
ed., Settlers and Expatriates, 104. For the responses of the “extremist”
segments of the European community to Mau Mau, see Dane Kennedy,
“Constructing the Colonial Myth of Mau Mau,” International Journal of
African Historical Studies 25: 2 (1992), 245–247.
114. The Statesman of Calcutta strongly criticized a town hall meeting in
which Europeans threatened “to take the law into their own hands.”
Statesman, 30 July 1931, cited in Maclean, “The Art of Panicking
Quietly,” 154.
115. Alexander Burnett, “Experiences in Chittagong Riots – April 1930,”
Alexander Burnett Papers, MSS Eur. C 806, APAC BL.
116. In 1926, for example, infantry, cavalry, and armored cars traveled through
Calcutta in the wake of Hindu-Muslim riots “‘as a show of strength to the
inhabitants who were unsettled owing to communal riots.’” David Omissi,
The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Basingstoke and
London: Macmillan, 1994), 214–215.
117. Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj, 215.
118. David Arnold, “The Armed Police and Colonial Rule in South India,
1914–1947,” Modern Asian Studies 11: 1 (1977), 105–106.
119. Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-
insurgency in the Kenyan Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 83–107.
120. Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj, 192–231; and Srinath Raghaven, “Protecting
the Raj: The Army in India and Internal Security, c. 1919–1939,” Small
Wars and Insurgencies 16: 3 (2005), 253–279.
121. Major General Bethell told the GOB that he believed a force of Assam
Rifles with two British officers would be adequate for garrison duties in
Chittagong. Major J. H. Woods, Presidency and Assam District, to CS to
GOB, 18 April 1931; R. M. Wright to T. G. A. Craig, IG, 23 April 1931;
and “Note of a discussion on the situation in Chittagong … on May 1,
1931,” GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 296 of 1931, WBSA.
178 M. SILVESTRI
122. H. W. Emerson, “Note on Discussion with the Bengal Government,” 5

November 1931, L/P&J/7/242, APAC BL.
123. Reid, Years of Change, 63.
124. Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory
125. H. G. Haig, Viceroy’s Council, to John Anderson, 19 November 1932,
Anderson Collection, MSS Eur. F 207/3, APAC BL.
126. Proceedings of the Civil and Military Conference held in Government
House, Calcutta, on the 3rd and 4th July 1934, p. 5. L/P&J/12/400,
APAC BL.
127. One British, one Garwhali, one Jat, and four Gurkha battalions were ini-
tially deployed in the province. Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj, 224.
128. “Instructions regarding the collection of information against terrorists,”
18 November 1932, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 1046 (1–5) of 1932,
WBSA.
129. Col. R. B. Deedes, Officiating Brigadier at Kharagpur, to L. B. Burrows,
Commissioner, Burdwan Division, 27 April 1934, L/P&J/12/399,
APAC BL.
130. “Note prepared for the Army Commander’s visit, dated 28th November
1933,” L/P&J/12/399, APAC BL.
131. Sarkar, Bengal 1928–1934, 137.
132. P. J. Griffiths, DM, Midnapore, to Brigade Commander, 8th (Bareilly)
Infantry Brigade, Kharagpur, 14 October 1933, L/P&J/12/399, APAC
BL.
133. “Instructions regarding the collection of information against terrorists,”
18 November 1932, Home (Pol) Conf. No. 1046 (1–5) of 1932, WBSA.
134. R. E. A. Ray noted that troops’ activities such as flag marches and even
cordoning during searches only made an “indirect” contribution to
intelligence-gathering. R. E. A. Ray, “Appreciation of the Terrorist
Situation in Bengal, prepared by the Deputy Inspector General of Police,
Intelligence Branch, C.I.D., for the Conference that is to be held in July,
1934,” p. 12, 28 June 1934, L/P&J/12/399, APAC BL.
House, Calcutta, on the 3rd and 4th July 1934, pp. 5–6. L/P&J/12/400,
APAC BL.
136. Major General George Lindsay, commander of the Presidency and Assam
District from 1935 to 1939, subsequently selected officers for appoint-
ment as MIOs. “Political and Administrative,” Pinnell Papers, MSS Eur.
D 911, APAC BL.
137. In 1936, for example, eight of the twelve Military Intelligence Officers
stationed in Bengal had some intelligence background. Two officers’
experience was limited to a British or Indian Army course in intelligence

while six had practical experience in army intelligence work in India or
Burma. Note by Major J. W. Young, 3 February 1936, GOB Home (Pol)
APAC BL.
139. Note by E. N. Blandy, Commissioner, Chittagong Division, nd, in
“Agenda for discussion at the Civil and Military Conference to be held …
on the 3rd July 1934,” p. 43, L/P&J/12/399, APAC BL.
140. Taylor’s wife Coralie wrote that Leonard “is exceptionally good, and has
taken a lot of work off Bob’s [Taylor’s] shoulders.” Taylor unsuccessfully
tried to persuade Leonard to transfer permanently to the Bengal Police
once his term of service ended in 1936. “He is first-class at D.I.B. work,
and he is just the type of man we want. But he is too keen on his own job
in the Army.” S. G. Taylor, “Note on the anti-terrorist campaign in
Mymensingh and the employment of troops in relation thereto,” 21 April
1934, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 277 of 1934, WBSA; Twynam and
Ray, Central and District Intelligence Branches, 24; Coralie Taylor to her
family, 22 August 1933; and S. G. Taylor to his family, 2 April 1935,
Taylor Papers, CSAS.
141. Finney noted, however, that the list only dated back to 1935, when the
MIO began compiling history sheets.
142. P. E. S. Finney, “Inspection remarks … on the District Intelligence
Branch office, on the 15th, 16th, and 17th Sept, 1936,” p. 5. Finney
Papers, CSAS.
143. General Police Arrangements in Connection with the Visit of His Excellency
the Governor of Bengal to Rangpur, 31st October to 2nd November, 1936.
Finney Papers, CSAS.
145. John Hunt, Life is Meeting (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978) 18,
21 and 23.
146. C. A. Bayly, “Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India,”
Modern Asian Studies 27: 1 (1993), 3.
147. Hunt wrote that he “grew to know and love Bengal,” and in his memoir
described rural scenes such as “the fishermen casting their circular nets
over a flooded paddy field.” Hunt, Life is Meeting, 25–26.
148. Hunt, Life is Meeting, 18.
APAC BL.
180 M. SILVESTRI
150. In spite of the frequent assassination attempts on British and Indian

police officers at this time, no attempt seems to have been made on the
lives of any army officer attached to the Bengal Police, probably because
of fear of reprisals by British or Indian Army troops.
151. B. C. Prance, DM, Dacca to H. Graham, Commissioner, Dacca Division,
23 April 1934, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 277 of 1934, WBSA.
152. Under the Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinance of 1932, a terrorist was
defined as not merely a member of a terrorist organization, but anyone
who “has done or is doing any act to assist the operations of any such
association,” which included any indirect contact with a terrorist suspect.
Calcutta Gazette, 10 June 1932, P&J No. 5172 of 1931, L/P&J/7/242,
APAC BL.
153. Hands wrote, “This incident illustrates well the ease with which abscond-
ers and active terrorists can move and obtain shelter in the Hindu villages
in the Boalkhali and Patiya thanas” near Chittagong town. A. S. Hands,
“Report on the operations against Absconders and Terrorists in the
Chittagong District from the 9th March 1932 to 31st March 1933,”
Parts I–III, 13 April 1933, P&J No. 5172 of 1931, L/P&J/7/242,
APAC BL.
154. Hunt, Life is Meeting, 21–22.
155. A. J. Dash, “Report on the operations against Absconders and Terrorists
in the Chittagong District from the 9th March 1932 to 31st March
1933,” Part IV, 13 April 1933, P&J No. 5172 of 1931, L/P&J/7/242,
APAC BL.
156. Anderson wrote to Sir Samuel Hoare that “I have my work cut out to
smooth the badly ruffled feathers of my police.” Anderson to Hoare, 22
July 1933 and 28 August 1933, Templewood Collection, MSS Eur. E
240, APAC BL.
157. Sir Henry Twynam, “Golden Years and Times of Stress,” 132, Twynam
Papers, CSAS.
159. Charles Tegart, “Terrorism in Bengal,” (1932) in TIB III: xxxvi–xxxvii.
160. David Petrie, quoted in Tegart memoir, 46.
162. John W. Wheeler-Bennett, John Anderson, Viscount Waverley (London:
Macmillan, 1962), 143–145 and 161–162. For details of the assassina-
tion attempt on Anderson, see “List of Outrages, 1934. Part A,” in TIB
VI: 1173–1177.
163. The ex-detenu’s supervisor, R. O. Raha, wrote of the goal of “Establishing
confidence permanently in a healthy quarter to which one may turn for
advice and help in the long future.” Report by R. O. Raha on YMCA
training scheme for ex-detenus [nd], enclosure to letter from W. R.
Gourlay, Private Sec. to GOB, to Hignell, GOI, 28 August 1920,

Chelmsford Papers, MSS Eur. E 264/6, APAC BL. Unless otherwise
stated, all information about the training scheme for ex-detenus in this
and the following two paragraphs is taken from this report.
1937 to August 1939,” (1940) in TIB I: 766.
1937 to August 1939,” (1940) in TIB I: 766; and Ghosh, Gentlemanly
Terrorists, 178–179. More than 400 Bengali men had passed through the
training scheme by the end of 1937. Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 200.
167. “Political and Administrative,” pp. 6–7, Pinnell Papers, MSS Eur. D 911,
APAC BL. Anderson’s biographer repeated Pinnell’s words verbatim in
the text of his book. Wheeler-Bennett, John Anderson, 138.
168. Patrick F. McDevitt, May the Best Man Win: Sport, Masculinity and
Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880–1935 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 7.
169. Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice
of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 292. Widespread
public celebrations greeted the victory of the Bengali team Mohun Bagan
over the East Yorkshire Regiment in the final of the 1911 Indian Football
Association Shield. See Chatterjee, Black Hole, 295–298; and Tony
Mason, “Football on the Maidan: Cultural Imperialism in Calcutta,” in
J. A. Mangan, ed., The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society (London
and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1992), 142–153.
170. Brian Griffin, “Sporting Policemen: Sports and Police in Victorian and
Edwardian Ireland,” Éire-Ireland 48: 1&2 (2013), 54–78. For the sport-
ing ethos of colonial police forces more generally, see Charles Jeffries, The
Colonial Police (London: Max Parrish, 1952), 37.
171. P. E. S. Finney, “Notes for the Additional Superintendent Headquarters.
Mymensingh. March, 1936,” p. 8, Finney Papers, CSAS.
172. Finney recalled that “I was particularly anxious that although I might take
action against people who were acting against the law throughout my
sub-division over the non-cooperation movement it didn’t stop me being
friendly with them on the football field.” He also noted with pride that a
police team won the first shield competition. Finney memoirs, Chap. 8,
p. 33, MSS Eur. D 1014/4, APAC BL.
173. Hunt, Life is Meeting, 25.
174. According to Hunt, ICS officer Percival Griffiths organized a similar
scheme in Mymensingh District. Hunt, Life is Meeting, 25; and L. G.
Pinnell, “John Anderson in Bengal: Political and Administrative” (1959),
Anderson Collection, MSS Eur. F 207, APAC BL.
182 M. SILVESTRI
175. S. K. Ghosh to F. W. Robertson, Commissioner, Rajshahi Division, 1

November 1935 and 18 November 1935, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No.
919 of 1935, WBSA.
176. Circular letter of Major M. Young, HQ, Presidency and Assam District,
18 September 1935; and S. K. Ghosh to F. W. Robertson, 18 November
1935, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 919 of 1935, WBSA.
177. Undated note by Charles Tegart [March-April 1937], in P. N. Chopra,
ed., Towards Freedom 1937–47. Volume I: Experiment with Provincial
Autonomy 1 January-31 December 1937 (New Delhi: Indian Council of
Historical Research, 1985), 1326. For a contemporary appreciation, see
Ladislav Jandásek, “The Sokol Movement in Czechoslovakia,” Slavonic
and Eastern European Review 11: 31 (1932), 65–80.
178. Hardinge added, “You may remember that only a few years ago there was
a sort of semi-military movement amongst the Bengali boys designed
purposely to facilitate agitation and its possible developments.” Hardinge
to Crewe, 6 June 1912, Hardinge Papers, 118/2/25, Cambridge
University Library.
179. According to Allen Warren, “The emergence of the All-India Council was
the occasion for an almost complete turn about in the attitude of the
government of India towards native Scouting. Previously regarding it as
potentially subversive, it now saw the Scouting philosophy as a potential
ally in the continuing battle between imperial control and the rising tide
of nationalism.” Allen Warren, “Citizens of the Empire: Baden-Powell,
Scouts and Guides and an Imperial Ideal, 1900–1940,” in John
M. Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1986), 249. See also Carey A. Watt, “The
Promise of ‘Character’ and the Spectre of Sedition: The Boy Scout
Movement and Colonial Consternation in India, 1908–1921,” South
Asia 12: 2 (1999), 37–62.
180. Carey Watt, “’No Showy Muscles’: The Boy Scouts and the Global
Dimensions of Physical Culture and Bodily Health in Britain and Colonial
India,” in Nelson R. Block and Tammy M. Proctor, eds., Scouting
Frontiers: Youth and the Scout Movement’s First Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 135.
181. H. D. Craik, GOB, to Lord Baden-Powell, 30 March 1937, and Baden-
Powell to Lord Brabourne, Governor of Bengal, 18 April 1937, in
Chopra, ed., Towards Freedom 1937–47, 295–296 and 402–403.
182. Coralie Taylor to her parents, 18 December 1934, S. G. Taylor Papers,
CSAS. In the same year, the Commissioner of Burdwan Division wrote to
the Government of Bengal that he encouraged “the Boy Scout, Folk-
dancing and Bratachari movements as affording healthy diversions during
leisure hours.” L. B. Burrows, Commissioner, Burdwan Division, to CS

to GOB, 30 May 1934, L/P&J/12/399, APAC BL.
183. Fortnightly Report on the Political Situation in Bengal, First Half of May
1938, R/3/2/7, APAC BL.
184. John Rosselli, “The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and
Nationalism in Nineteenth-century Bengal,” Past and Present No. 86
(1980), 141.
185. Sayantani Adhikary, “The Bratachari Movement and the Invention of a
‘Folk Tradition,’” South Asia 38: 4 (2015), 656–670; and Frank
J. Korom, “Gurusaday Dutt, Vernacular Nationalism and the Folk
Culture Revival in Colonial Bengal,” in Firoz Mahmud and Sharani
Zaman, eds., Folklore in Context: Essays in Honor of Shamsuzzaman Khan
(Dhaka: The University Press, 2010), 257–273.
186. G. S. Dutt, The Bratachari Synthesis (1937; Reprint Calcutta: Bengal
Bratachari Society, 1981), 21.
187. Ramananda Chatterji, The Bratachari Movement (Calcutta: Bengal
Bratachari Society, 1940), 23.
188. Rosselli, “Self-Image of Effeteness,” 141.
189. Dutt, Bratachari Synthesis, 23 and 58.
190. Dutt, Bratachari Synthesis, 6 and 10.
191. Anderson to Lord Zetland, Sec. of State for India, 31 October 1935,
Anderson Collection, MSS Eur. F. 207/6, APAC BL; and Note by
S. Basu, 25 June 1935, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 664 of 1935,
WBSA.
192. Cited in Dutt, Bratachari Synthesis, 7.
193. Dutt, Bratachari Synthesis, 15.
194. Wheeler-Bennett, John Anderson, 135.
196. Government of Bengal officials, however, argued that in spite of concerns
about the security of police intelligence under an Indian ministry, “with-
out the effective cooperation of the ordinary Police,” the IB would be
“pretty helpless,” and would have a “false perspective” on political issues.
John Anderson to Sir Samuel Hoare, Sec. of State, 28 August 1933 and
2 January 1934, Templewood Collection, MSS Eur. E 240/9, APAC
BL. Additional Sec. S. N. Roy of the GOB further emphasized the role of
the ordinary police in monitoring detenus and conducting searches. Note
by S. N. Roy, 31 January 1934, enclosure to Anderson to Hoare, 14
February 1934, in Ibid.
PART II
The Wider World

CHAPTER 5
Transnational Revolutionaries and Imperial

Surveillance: Bengal Revolutionary Networks
Outside India
Heramba Lal Gupta’s voyage from Calcutta to England in 1911 was

doubtless a significant journey in his life, but it marked only the beginning
of his global odyssey during and after the Great War. He made his trip to
England with a “known anarchist,” possibly a fellow Bengali revolution-
ary, but soon moved to America, where, in common with many other
Bengali immigrants at the time, he earned a living as a peddler of “Oriental”
goods.1 He traveled to Argentina twice, working as a salesman for a depart-
ment store, before returning to the United States. Three months after the
beginning of the Great War, he left New York, bound for India, but dis-
embarked in Naples. After a stay in Germany, he returned to the United
States, where he was “largely responsible” for one of the central episodes
of Indo-German planning to smuggle arms to Bengali revolutionaries.
When this failed, he traveled to Japan in a further effort to arrange arms
shipments to India, but was forced to flee back to San Francisco when the
Japanese government ordered his arrest and deportation. Gupta was
arrested and convicted of conspiring to send an armed expedition to India,
but skipped bail and fled to Buenos Aires. From there, he traveled to
Mexico, where he joined the Bengali revolutionary Narendra Nath
Bhattacharya, who had become known as M. N. Roy. Under the name
Francisco Lopez, he traveled on a Mexican passport via Spain to Zurich in
November 1920. Gupta soon went on to Berlin, where by 1921 he had
become the Secretary of the Central Executive Committee of Indian
Revolutionaries in Europe.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_5
188 M. SILVESTRI
Historians can reconstruct the travels of Heramba Lal Gupta because

his journeys and his contacts with other revolutionaries and revolutionary
organizations were monitored by British intelligence agencies.2 British
intelligence did not get all of the details correct; Gupta may have traveled
to the United States as early as 1906, which was the date he gave in 1910
to a clerk of the court in Charleston, South Carolina.3 Nonetheless, sub-
stantial information about his activities appeared in a volume of MI5’s
“Black List” devoted to Indian revolutionary suspects. The volume was
likely compiled by the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, which was
responsible for British intelligence operations beyond the borders of the
Empire. In forwarding the report to the India Office in the summer of
1921, SIS Director Mansfield Cumming observed that it was “being
launched under the kind auspices of M.I.5, so as to give it some kind of
official birthright.”4 By 1928, the volume was out of date, and a new edi-
tion was issued by Indian Political Intelligence, the London-based office
that was responsible for coordinating information relating to Indian revo-
lutionaries worldwide.5
The previous three chapters have traced the development of police
intelligence and the anti-terrorist campaign in Bengal, from its roots in
colonial police practices prior to the Great War to the incorporation of
Indian and British Army troops into the campaign in the 1930s. This
chapter shifts the focus outside of Bengal to examine how imperial intel-
ligence agencies responded to the global dimensions of the Indian revo-
lutionary movement during and after the First World War. From the
outset of the revolutionary movement in Bengal, revolutionaries traveled
abroad to forge alliances with other anticolonial figures and learn about
ideologies and tactics such as bomb-making. They formed a prominent
part of what Tim Harper refers to as “the Asian underground” of nation-
alists, revolutionaries, and political activists.6 This chapter examines how
imperial intelligence networks sought to monitor the activities and
thwart the plans of these revolutionaries. As imperial intelligence officers
monitored Bengali revolutionaries abroad, the intelligence community
based in Bengal consolidated their reach into areas beyond the subconti-
nent. Since the lives of revolutionaries abroad helped both spur the
development of imperial intelligence agencies and formed the primary
target of their analyses, the lives and revolutionary aspirations of some
prominent Bengali revolutionaries who lived abroad receive consider-
ation as well.
5 TRANSNATIONAL REVOLUTIONARIES AND IMPERIAL SURVEILLANCE… 189
While many revolutionaries lived transnational lives, often seeking ref-

uge beyond the boundaries of the British Empire, they maintained links
with revolutionaries in Bengal. This chapter discusses a diverse set of
radical anticolonialists from or with linkages to Bengal. They include
M. N. Roy, the founder of the Communist Party of India; Sailendranath
Ghose, sometimes associate of Roy and leader of an Indian revolutionary
organization in New York City; and Rash Behari Bose, the orchestrator
of the 1912 assassination attempt on Lord Hardinge and a Pan-Asianist
who lived in exile for almost three decades in Japan. Other figures with
more complex relationships to the revolutionary movement in Bengal
also came under the scrutiny of imperial intelligence agencies; these
included both the Latvian-born revolutionary known variously as Hugo
Espinoza and Abdur Raschid and the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas
Chandra Bose.
While most studies of Bengali revolutionaries have focused on their
activities within the province, emphasizing the indigenous roots of their
anticolonial organizations, as the above examples illustrate, the revolu-
tionary movement stretched around the globe.7 Recent scholarship has
explored the transnational activities of revolutionaries and other anticolo-
nial activists and the kaleidoscopic identities, ideologies, and alliances
which they brought to their pursuit of the end of imperialism.8 Scholars
have rightly emphasized the internationalist vision of these anticolonial
activists.9 Yet at the same time, we need to remain attentive to the ways in
which that internationalist vision intersected with nationalism. Although
the Bengali revolutionaries were consistently receptive to inspirations and
techniques that would help them achieve their goal of a large-scale antico-
lonial uprising, their worldview did not fundamentally shift (toward a
more internationalist vision) until the end of the revolutionary campaign
in the mid-1930s.10 Nonetheless, they communicated with and sought
assistance and inspiration from a broad range of anticolonial activists in
ways that troubled imperial authorities.
While there has been an abundance of recent scholarship on the trans-
national activities of anticolonial activists, there has been rather less on the
imperial intelligence agencies that opposed them.11 Examining the activi-
ties of the Bengali revolutionaries enables us to trace a web of transna-
tional and cross-colonial revolutionary connections, as well as the
corresponding efforts of imperial intelligence agencies to arrest and detain
their members and neutralize their plans for armed insurgency.
190 M. SILVESTRI
1 “A Stronghold of the Bengali

Revolutionaries”: Chandernagore
The “foreign” dimensions of the policing of revolutionary terrorism in
Bengal began just over twenty miles from Calcutta, in the French colony
of Chandernagore. Although the British had established themselves as the
dominant European power in India in the late eighteenth century, the
French retained five enclaves in the subcontinent. Referred to collectively
as Inde française and Les Indes, these geographically isolated and region-
ally distinct territories had a “small and yet multipolar geographical
focus.”12 One of these enclaves, Chandernagore, was located along the
Hooghly River approximately twenty-two miles upriver from Calcutta.
Politically a part of the French Empire, but socially and culturally part of
Bengal, Chandernagore was connected to the revolutionary movement
from its earliest years and presented a persistent problem for colonial
police authorities.13 The challenges that British colonial authorities con-
fronted in Chandernagore foreshadowed many of the issues that they
dealt with worldwide and also illustrate the changing police strategies for
countering Bengali revolutionaries.
Beyond the fact that it was outside the jurisdiction of the British Empire,
Chandernagore offered a number of advantages to the revolutionaries: its
proximity to Calcutta, its location as a riverside port, and the relative
porousness of its borders. In addition, Chandernagore featured a strong
nationalist political culture that embraced both the revolutionary organi-
zation of the samitis and the open organization of the Swadeshi move-
ments. Some of the earliest revolutionary samitis were founded in
Chandernagore, and a number of prominent revolutionaries, notably Rash
Behari Bose, came from there.14 In Margaret Majumdar’s judgment,
“Chandernagore was not just fully integrated into the Bengali revolution-
ary movement; it was one of its most important centres.”15 Chandernagore
emerged as an important center for the revolutionaries in three ways: as a
source of firearms, a source of political literature produced both there and
outside India, and lastly as a place of refuge from the Bengal Police where
planning could be conducted in secrecy.
For the revolutionaries, the acquisition of weapons from overseas was a
consistent goal, and Chandernagore was one of their early main sources of
firearms. In contrast to the stringent control of arms in British India under
the Arms Act of 1878, prior to 1907 there was little regulation of weapons
in Chandernagore. There were no restriction on the import of guns, and
in the words of a Calcutta Police officer, residents “could import and keep
any number of guns of any variety.”16 In response to rising nationalist sen-
timent within Chandernagore, an Arms Act was imposed across French
India in 1907, but not before the amount of arms imported into
Chandernagore had increased markedly.17 Bengal Police officers consid-
ered the Arms Act to be ineffective and, in Charles Tegart’s words, to be
“more honoured in the breach than in the observance.”18
Firearms were also smuggled into Chandernagore via the post in British
India and occasionally seem to have been purchased by European resi-
dents for Bengali friends. (The Mayor of Chandernagore told Calcutta
Police inspector S. Sen, who was investigating the arms traffic there, that
he himself had done this.) This led Sen to report somewhat hyperbolically
that “every middle-class Bengali home at this little settlement has each got
at least a gun and a revolver.”19 One of the revolutionaries’ most spectacu-
lar assassinations prior to the Great War, the shooting of the approver
Narendra Nath Goswami in Alipore Jail in the midst of the Alipore Bomb
Trial, was carried out with two revolvers obtained from Chandernagore.20
Intelligence officers also noted the role of Chandernagore as a center
for “seditious” literature prior to the Great War. In 1913, Charles Tegart,
then an Assistant Superintendent in the Intelligence Branch (IB), noted
that nationalist and anticolonial publications that had been banned years
earlier in British India, such as the Irish republican Gaelic American and
Shyamji Krishnavarma’s Indian Sociologist, continued to circulate legally
in Chandernagore. Copies were mailed from Paris “and other centres of
the revolutionary organization” to Chandernagore through the French
postal system. One nationalist editor, S. N. Sen, in addition to producing
the “seditious” newspaper Matribhum, received bulk shipments of the
Gaelic American and forwarded them to subscribers in India, mostly edi-
tors of newspapers in Calcutta and elsewhere in Bengal.21 Over the first
two decades of the revolutionary movement, the publication in and
importation from Chandernagore of seditious literature became a greater
concern for British colonial authorities than the importation of weapons.
In addition to the importation of arms and “seditious” literature, intel-
ligence officials were also deeply concerned about Chandernagore as a
place of refuge from the Bengal Police. In the words of the Government
of Bengal, Chandernagore was “an Alsatia for revolutionary fugitives” and
“an active center of plots.”22 In 1912, a compilation of political suspects
by the IB listed thirty-five from Chandernagore, nine of whom were
important enough to have their own history sheets on file.23 Rash Behari
192 M. SILVESTRI
Bose and Srish Chandra Ghosh occupied adjacent houses in Chandernagore

and were both involved in the planning of the assassination attempt on
Lord Hardinge. The Intelligence Bureau described Ghosh in 1915 as
“one of the most formidable revolutionists in Bengal,” with contacts to
revolutionaries across the province.24 The status of Chandernagore as a
center of revolutionary organization and planning continued in the inter-
war period. In 1921, police intelligence believed that a secret society was
headquartered at Chandernagore “whose object is to prepare for the
introduction of Sinn Fein methods of warfare.”25 The Government of
Bengal observed four years later that Chandernagore “has always been a
stronghold of the Bengal revolutionaries and a centre from which some of
their most important and daring schemes have been controlled.”26
These three interlocking concerns—arms smuggling, seditious litera-
ture, and revolutionary planning within Chandernagore—were illustrated
in the case of an organization known as the Prabartak Sangha, founded by
Moti Lal Ray. Ray was associated with many important activities of the
Bengali revolutionaries before and during the Great War. He sheltered
Aurobindo Ghose in 1909 as Ghose fled British India and introduced
Rash Behari Bose to the two revolutionaries who would carry out the
assassination attempt on Hardinge. He was entrusted with a box of arms
and ammunition stolen in 1914 from Rodda and Co. in Calcutta, and was
one of the contacts in the Indo-German plans to import arms into India
during the Great War.27 Founded around 1911, the Prabartak Sangha had
by the following decade established a series of businesses such as a dye fac-
tory and a cabinet shop promoting Swadeshi goods that the IB considered
to be “nothing else but revolutionary centres masquerading as business
concerns.”28
The publications of the Prabartak Sangha, printed in Chandernagore,
also attracted the attention of the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch (IB),
notably a 1923 book titled Kanailal, a collection of articles written by Ray
about one of the Chandernagore-born assassins of Narendra Nath
Goswami during the Alipore Bomb Trial. A prominent example of the
widespread “eulogy literature” produced after the Great War that pre-
sented models of “the disciplined, modern revolutionary subject … will-
ing to sacrifice his life for the nation,” Kanailal featured numerous
photographs not only of its subject, but of Khudiram Bose and other early
revolutionary martyrs.29 The Government of Bengal concluded that there
was “no doubt” that the book was intended both to discourage “anarchists
from turning approvers when captured and of inciting the youth of Bengal
to imitate the assassins whose eulogies are set forth in its pages.”30
In their efforts to stop the flow of weapons and literature from
Chandernagore, and to apprehend revolutionary suspects who had fled
there, the Bengal Police were often frustrated by their French counter-
parts. Language was an obvious barrier, as few British and fewer Indian
officers were fluent in French. When S. Sen was meeting with the
Administrateur of Chandernagore in 1907, another official had to trans-
late.31 Moreover, British police officers possessed a generally low opinion
of their counterparts in Chandernagore, where as late as 1911 there were
no detectives or plain clothes police. “It is reported that the French Police
have no semblance of discipline and no sense of responsibility,” Tegart
fumed. “There are, practically speaking, no night patrols, nor any orga-
nized system to cope with crime.” Worse still, some police officials in
Chandernagore were believed to sympathize with the nationalists. The
Adjutant of the French Police, Dhrubadas Kole, was described as “a dan-
gerous creature and a mere creature in the hands of the swadeshi lead-
ers.”32 Tegart noted that unlike Calcutta, Chandernagore was
a small place sparsely inhabited, where newcomers are readily marked down.
It is only the license permitted by the defective police arrangements in
Chandernagore, which admittedly has no machinery to cope with revolu-
tionary conspiracies, coupled with the fact that no powers similar to the
Defence of India Act or Regulation III of 1818 have been taken by the
French authorities in India during the war, which has permitted and encour-
aged the growth and dissemination of seditious propaganda in and from
Chandernagore.33
At an early stage, the Bengal Police placed their own agents in

Chandernagore. In 1907, a police sub-inspector named Preonath De car-
ried out enquiries there. De was considered to possess “special qualifica-
tions” for the role, as he was a resident of Chandernagore, and had been
a former headmaster at Dupleix College there before joining the police.
Six years later, Tegart noted that he had his own informant in
Chandernagore.34 Nonetheless, the IB found it difficult to keep revolu-
tionaries under surveillance. While De had been successful for a time at
gaining information about the revolutionaries, in general the placement of
agents within Chandernagore yielded “very disappointing” results, as rev-
olutionaries were cautious and suspicious of outsiders. In addition to the
194 M. SILVESTRI
hostility of French authorities to British surveillance, watchers, fearing

attacks from the revolutionaries, were reluctant to shadow anyone within
the borders of Chandernagore. By 1913, the IB had evolved a solution of
placing surveillance on six principal revolutionaries, which involved watch-
ers shadowing them when they left Chandernagore, with additional
watchers stationed at railway stations on the lines leading from French
territory.35
Although the cooperation of French authorities rarely met British
expectations, there was a pattern of assistance, sometimes covert, to colo-
nial police in Bengal. Although Sen’s request in 1907 to obtain the names
of Chandernagore residents to whom arms were shipped was refused by
the Governor of Pondicherry, Sen reported that some police officers “have
confided in me privately” and had supplied him with “important informa-
tion.” These included the chance to “surreptitiously” copy information
from government registers, which Sen reproduced in his report.36 In
October 1916, a time when the revolutionary movement posed a potent
threat, Bengal officials, including the Commissioner of the Calcutta Police
and the head of the IB, met with the Governor of French possessions in
India and the Administrateur of Chandernagore. The police supplied
French officials with translated history sheets of Moti Lal Ray and
Manindra Naik, another revolutionary leader. As a result of the confer-
ence, the Governor allowed the Government of Bengal to replace plain-
clothes British officers stationed in Chandernagore with Bengal Police
officers, who would become part of the “regular establishment” of the
French Police there, “and would thus be able to exercise a certain amount
of authority in French territory.”37 The Administrateur also granted per-
mission for the IB to conduct three house searches with the assistance of
the French police; the French authorities initially retained possession of
the documents seized but allowed the IB to view them after an application
was made by the Government of Bengal.38
Negotiations with French authorities continued after the Great War.
The Government of Bengal was anxious for them to take action against
the Prabartak Press following the publication of Kanailal, but the
Governor of the French Settlements in India, while agreeing that the writ-
ings were “dangerous” because of their potential to “disturb the minds of
young people,” defended the liberty of the press and contended that since
the book had already extensively circulated in Bengal—the first edition
had sold out and the IB had difficulty obtaining a copy—any attempt to
curtail publication “would recall Kanai Lal anew to the mind of the
ublic.” The Governor did consent to apply the policy in Pondicherry to

p
Chandernagore and allow the Bengal Police to station four or five agents
in the French territory, whom the French authorities would aid “to the
best of their ability.” The Government of Bengal was satisfied with the
response, and in 1925 the French Governor suspended publication of the
journal Prabartak for three months on the grounds of its incitement to
murder. The following year, the Government of India banned the impor-
tation of all publications by the Prabartak Press under the Sea Customs
Act of 1878.39
The extradition of revolutionary suspects from Chandernagore
remained a point of tension between British and French authorities.
Bengal intelligence officers displayed a willingness to disregard formal
extradition procedures; according to one former IB officer, Charles Tegart
in 1908 seized Charu Chandra Roy, a professor at Dupleix College and a
suspected member of the Manicktolla revolutionary group, at his home
and brought him to Calcutta for interrogation.40 While Roy soon regained
his freedom, the French authorities returned him to the custody of the
British in June 1908. Roy was, however, only extradited after the
Administrateur was given the “specific particulars” on which he would be
indicted. The Government of Bengal feared that the French authorities’
broad interpretation of “political offenses” would significantly hamper
their ability to obtain custody of revolutionaries.41 Roy was indicted in the
Alipore Bomb Trial, but his case was dropped after the intervention of the
French ambassador in London, amid condemnation of l’imperialisme
anglais in the French Senate.42 For successive Bengal government admin-
istrations, the only viable solution seemed to be an exchange of territory,
which would cede territory around Pondicherry in exchange for British
control of Chandernagore.43
Frustrations with the extradition process, and the threat that revolu-
tionaries posed to colonial authorities in Bengal following the Chittagong
Armoury Raid, led colonial police to make an unprecedented intervention
in Chandernagore in 1930. This was in the form of armed raid of over
twenty British officers of the Calcutta and Bengal Police, who attempted
to arrest four “absconders” from the Armoury Raid on the night of 31
August. For weeks prior to what became known as the Chandernagore
Raid, Bengal Police officer P. E. S. Finney, who was on good terms with
the Administrateur of Chandernagore, had been told by Charles Tegart to
stay in touch with him “about the possibility of terrorist absconders going
to ground in Chandernagore.”44 The immediate pretext for the raid was a
196 M. SILVESTRI
failed assassination attempt on Tegart in Calcutta’s Dalhousie Square on

25 August. Tegart’s murder was to have been the signal for widespread
attacks upon colonial servants and infrastructure in Bengal, and two days
later the Inspector General of Police was shot dead in Dacca.45
Tegart maintained that it was his source that led police to the “abscond-
ers” in Chandernagore, although his would-be assassins may have pro-
vided a clue by using revolvers stolen during the Armoury Raid. One
revolutionary also maintained that some of the information was obtained
under torture.46 The Government of Bengal contacted the Administrateur,
who agreed to allow the British officers to surround the house where the
revolutionaries had taken shelter and then notify the French police so that
they could search the premises. The British police contingent—ten offi-
cers, ten sergeants, and one inspector—was armed with service revolvers
and carried electric torches, in addition to an assortment of shotguns and
rifles. “The French police were in no wise sufficiently armed to deal with
strongly armed terrorists,” Tegart later wrote.47 Tegart’s wife Kathleen
described the action as “in essence … a forerunner of the later commando
raid of the war for the party wore tennis shoes and covered their faces with
masks or scarves so that they should not show too clearly in the dark-
ness.”48 According to one participant, an informer accompanied them
with his upper body covered with a blanket to shield his identity.49
The police successfully surrounded the house at around 2:45 a.m., but
the revolutionaries, who had posted a watch, attempted to escape, firing
on the police in what became a heated exchange of gunfire. One Chittagong
revolutionary, Makhan Ghosal, was killed, and three others—Loke Nath
Bal, Ganesh Ghosh, and Ananda Gupta—as well as the two occupants of
the house, were detained by the British officers. Tegart notified the
Administrateur, and the French police arrived at 3:40 a.m., although
according to French law they could not carry out a search of the house
prior to 4:00 a.m. After a formal application by the Bengal government,
the revolutionaries were taken into custody the following afternoon.
The Chandernagore Raid anticipated the more aggressive approach
that, as we have seen, colonial authorities were to take toward the revolu-
tionaries in the 1930s. The police were “armed to the teeth” in the words
of one participant and fired repeatedly at two revolutionaries who tried to
escape via a tank, killing one. The raid also attracted intense criticism
within Chandernagore, where police had to hold back an angry crowd
who appeared around the house, and protestors attempted to free the
prisoners before they could be extradited. The Mayor of Chandernagore
formally protested to the governor in Pondicherry, who requested that the

Government of India forward to the Foreign Office the Bengal govern-
ment’s statement that the raid was a “most urgent necessity for the safety
of Bengal” and carried out in accordance with French law.50
Although the Chandernagore Raid was considered one of the Bengal
Police’s triumphs in the anti-terrorist campaign, revolutionaries continued
to use Chandernagore’s status as foreign territory to their advantage.51 In
March 1933, the Commissioner of the Police in Chandernagore was shot
and fatally wounded while trying to arrest three revolutionaries. Two
escaped but the third, Biren Roy, who was wanted in connection with an
attempt to assassinate Alfred Watson, the editor of the Statesman, was
apprehended. Although Roy was acquitted after a trial in Chandernagore,
he was subsequently extradited to Bengal and detained under the Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act.52 Intelligence Branch DIG C. E.
S. Fairweather complained that Chandernagore was “once again being
used as a shelter for very important absconders. Within the town itself it is
practically impossible to arrange searches owing to the difficulties placed
in our way by the French authorities.”53 From the perspective of intelli-
gence officers seeking to contain the activities of anticolonial revolutionar-
ies, these difficulties in monitoring and apprehending revolutionaries
within Chandernagore were to be repeated on a wider scale outside India
in the interwar period.
2 Policing Transnational Revolutionaries

The development of the police intelligence apparatus in Bengal, as we
have seen, led to growing confidence in the expertise of its officers. The
officers of the Bengal Police IB believed firmly that they understood the
machinations of the Bengali revolutionaries better than their counterparts
elsewhere in the Empire. R. E. A. Ray later recalled that he could not
remember a single instance where he received “secret information” regard-
ing Bengal revolutionaries from any other provincial police force.54 This
did not mean, however, that the Bengal Police were not deeply concerned
about contacts between Bengali revolutionaries and anticolonial activists
elsewhere in India and outside the Raj. Officers were keenly aware of the
potential for the revolutionaries to seek aid and assistance from overseas,
particularly from like-minded nationalists, revolutionaries, and anticolo-
nial activists. Indeed, one of the threats posed by Chandernagore was that
revolutionaries’ activities there were “closely connected with revolutionary
198 M. SILVESTRI
elements in other parts of India and with Indian revolutionaries in foreign

countries.”55 Intelligence reports from the 1920s feature numerous refer-
ences to the international connections of revolutionaries, as well as their
relationships with revolutionary groups elsewhere in India.56 A 1925 IB
analysis, for example, discussed Bengali revolutionary connections ranging
from Chandernagore and Pondicherry to Moscow, Paris, Germany,
and Japan.57
As Harald Fischer-Tiné has argued, “the multilayered and multifaceted
global entanglements of nationalist projects” were already pronounced
prior to the Great War, particularly among radical nationalists—those
labeled “anarchists” and “terrorists” within India—who engaged with lib-
eral ideas as well as revolutionary ideologies.58 Indian communities in
places such as North America and Southeast Asia played a significant role
in the construction of the idea of the Indian nation and a distinctive
“Indian” form of anticolonial politics.59 As Indian nationalism became a
global movement, anticolonial activists sought not only to make alliances
in order to overthrow the British rule but also to formulate a vision for a
more just economic and political order.60 In the words of the Punjabi
nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai, who spent several years in exile in the United
States, nationalists overseas hoped to participate in nothing less than “the
making of the new world.”61
Prior to the Great War, the travels of Bengali revolutionaries overseas,
and their direct contacts with foreign revolutionaries, were nonetheless
relatively limited. The revolutionary Hemchandra Das met with a number
of anarchists and revolutionary socialists during a 1906 journey to Paris
and learned bomb-making techniques from the Russian anarchist Nicolas
Safranski.62 While the explicit goal of Das’ journey was to further his
knowledge of revolutionary technologies and ideologies, some young
Indians became adherents of anticolonialism while overseas. A young
bhadralok named Sarat Chandra Mukerji from Dacca District in eastern
Bengal had no apparent connections to revolutionary politics when he
traveled to the United States before the Great War to further his educa-
tion. There, however, he displayed “revolutionary tendencies” according
to British intelligence. After the outbreak of the war, he contributed a
“violently anti-British” article to a German newspaper in the United States
and was identified as “President of the Indian Liberty Association,
America.” During the war, under the alias of Muhammad Ali, he may have
traveled to Constantinople. In the company of another Bengali revolu-
tionary named Pramatha Nath Dutt, a veteran of the French Foreign
Legion, he traveled to Persia. When he returned to India in April 1919, he

had lost a leg, and although he left India six months later, British intelli-
gence was unable to account for his whereabouts.63
As the examples of Hemchandra Das and Sarat Chandra Mukerji show,
while the global travels of Bengali revolutionaries began prior to the Great
War, they grew more extensive during and after the war. The involvement
of Bengalis abroad with the Ghadar Party in North America and the arms-
smuggling efforts of revolutionaries in Bengal with the Ghadarites and the
German imperial government that stretched across Southeast Asia broad-
ened the scope of the revolutionary movement within the province. It also
created a pressing imperative for imperial authorities to monitor and trace
the movements of these anticolonial revolutionaries. As the revolutionary
organizations increased their global reach and the complexity of their rela-
tionships with other nationalists, anticolonialists, and foreign govern-
ments, imperial intelligence agencies were created to counter them. In the
interwar period, Bengal intelligence officers would work closely with these
agencies in monitoring revolutionary activity overseas and the diverse alli-
ances formed by revolutionaries.
The Indo-German conspiracies in Southeast Asia led to “the organiza-
tion of a new, and much more coherent, British security apparatus in the
region.”64 Daniel Brückenhaus has recently analyzed the important col-
laboration—and friction—among the British, French, and German gov-
ernments in the surveillance of anticolonial activists in the first decades of
the twentieth century.65 The organization responsible for the coordination
of intelligence work worldwide against Indian anticolonialists and revolu-
tionaries, Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), had already been created
prior to the Great War. The first political assassination to take place in the
twentieth-century United Kingdom, the shooting of the Secretary of State
for India’s aide-de-camp by Madan Lal Dhingra on 1 July 1909 led to the
posting of an Indian Police officer in London. In early 1910, on the rec-
ommendation of the Director of Criminal Intelligence of the Government
of India, Bombay Police Superintendent John Arnold Wallinger was
attached to the India Office.66 Wallinger’s appointment marked the begin-
ning of IPI, which remained a center of intelligence collation and analysis
regarding Indian anticolonial activism until its dissolution in 1947.
Even at its height, IPI remained a small office; after 1924, it was
attached to MI5. In 1926, its staff in addition to Wallinger consisted of
three secretaries, one clerk, and one typist. Like MI5 in this period, IPI
was reliant upon female secretaries of “good education” who were
200 M. SILVESTRI
r esponsible for “much original work.”67 IPI also maintained two officers
in the field, one in Paris and one in Geneva. The Geneva officer in
Wallinger’s description controlled “practically all of our agents abroad.”
Wallinger headed IPI until his retirement in 1926, and there was strong
continuity in its field officers as well: the Paris officer and clerk had joined
in 1911, and their counterparts in Geneva in 1919.68 In spite of the small
office—Wallinger’s successor Philip Vickery complained about the burden
of “routine work” imposed by “insufficient” staff—IPI was commended
for its valuable work against Indian anticolonialists, notably during the
Meerut Conspiracy Case.69
IPI’s archive of almost 800 files documents, in Kate O’Malley’s words,
“the gradual development of an international contra-imperialist nexus
which the British government gradually became aware and apprehensive
of.” Files relating to communist movements formed the largest category,
reflecting the fact that IPI tended to privilege the threat of communism
over other forms of anticolonial activity.70 While mainstream Indian
nationalism was certainly underrepresented (files relating to the Indian
National Congress only amount to two percent of the total), it is impor-
tant to bear in mind that the files include intelligence on a diverse collec-
tion of anti-imperial individuals and movements relating to locations
around the globe. This includes movements, such as the Ghadar Party,
which defy easy categorization as one particular variant of anticolonialism.
As Maia Ramnath has argued, Ghadar “functioned to provide connecting
links and switching points to other related movements.” It is better to
speak of “Ghadarites” rather than “Ghadar,” as “numerous individuals
wore multiple hats without conflict.”71
Intelligence officers in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London were also
engaged in tracing the networks and relationships that linked diverse anti-
colonial movements. As Tim Harper has observed, both revolutionaries
and imperial police officers shared “an obsession with making connec-
tions.”72 The relationship between Indian anticolonial activists and Irish
republicans and communists has already been well documented, based
largely upon IPI archive.73 Bengal Police officers were among the con-
tributors to this process of tracing and monitoring the networks of antico-
lonial revolutionaries. Most prominently, Charles Tegart was involved in
these efforts during his almost six years as an assistant to Wallinger at IPI
from 1917 to 1923.
Tegart was one of several Indian Police officers who were deputed to
assist Wallinger during and after the Great War.74 During his time in
London, Tegart, who had a reputation in Bengal for personally supervis-

ing the work of Indian agents, was responsible for agents in Europe who
reported on the activities of Indian anticolonialists.75 IPI maintained offi-
cers in Paris and Geneva through the mid-1920s, and in March 1920,
Tegart was able to convince S.I.S. to fund IPI’s agent in Geneva, a postwar
center of international espionage, for £1500 per year and in return “get
from him all his non-Indian stuff in exchange.”76
While European police often considered one of their prime difficulties
in anticolonial surveillance to be the “reading” of “inscrutable” natives,
the presence of intelligence officers with colonial experience such as Tegart
held out the promise of making the mysterious and exotic ways of Indians
legible.77 His analyses of the Indian Communist Party made frequent
efforts to explain the complicated history and politics of the Bengal revo-
lutionaries to an unfamiliar audience, and to make clear their relevance to
the actions of transnational revolutionaries such as the former Jugantar
member M. N. Roy, the founder of the Communist Party of India. In
August 1922, for example, Tegart noted that the cooperation of former
Dacca Anushilan Samiti leader Pulin Das with Roy was “significant in view
of the fact that Pulin Das has a large party, mainly composed of old mem-
bers of the Bengal Revolutionary Party, under his control in Bengal at the
present time.”78 Later that year, Tegart parsed for Wallinger a set of letters
from Roy which were intercepted by the Intelligence Bureau in New
Delhi, noting the current and past revolutionary connections of three of
Roy’s Bengal contacts.79
Tegart was deeply involved with the surveillance of Roy; during 1922
and 1923, he authored the majority of IPI’s reports on the Indian
Communist Party.80 He also strongly advocated that the British govern-
ment take action to extradite Roy from Germany, fearing both the con-
tacts he was building with Bengali revolutionaries and his sophisticated
plans to import communist literature and weapons to India. In December
1922, Tegart reviewed a lengthy report on “Indian Revolutionaries” pre-
pared by Paul Biggane, a fellow Indian Police officer deputed to IPI dur-
ing 1922–1923.81 After conferring with Biggane, Tegart was “anxious
that all possibilities of action against Roy’s organization should be exam-
ined carefully.” Biggane requested permission to call a meeting of Colonel
J. F. C. Carter, the head of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police,
SIS, Tegart, and himself to submit recommendations for action.82 While
Wallinger and India Office officials initially feared that efforts to extradite
Roy would merely cause him to move to Switzerland or Russia where
202 M. SILVESTRI
surveillance would be more difficult, by the summer of 1923, Wallinger

advocated cooperating with the German police in order to “cause incon-
venience” to Roy and his wife Evelyn.83 During the remainder of the
1920s, the India Office and British intelligence made more aggressive
efforts to harass Roy through intervention with German and French police
and provided information to the French government, which led to Roy’s
expulsion in 1925.84
In addition to making the revolutionary politics of Bengal legible to
officials in London, and tracing the international connections of revolu-
tionaries, during his time with IPI. Tegart also paid close attention to
republican and radical politics in Ireland. Like his fellow Anglo-Irishman
Philip Vickery, Tegart took care to highlight the connections between
Irish radicals and Indian revolutionaries and communists, in particular
their involvement in arms smuggling.85 In 1921, Tegart authored a report
on “The Relation between Soviet [sic] and Sinn Fein,” presumably for
SIS.86 In addition to the assistance that Tegart’s sources indicated that
Irish communists were giving Roy with matters such as the transmission of
messages to contacts in England and the purchase of arms, he detailed
Roy’s commentary on Irish affairs. In September 1922, he reported that
republicans in the Irish Civil War were “buying arms and ammunition in
large quantities from a firm in Hamburg. The name and address of this
firm are not at present available. The firm have expressed their willingness
to sell arms to Indians, provided satisfactory arrangements can be made
for their safe delivery to Berlin.”87 Two months later, Tegart pointed out
that Roy’s periodical, now titled Advance Guard, was listed as published
by the “Emerald Press” of Dublin (in reality it was printed in Germany).
In the 15 October issue, he noted how Roy reproduced as a model for
revolutionaries a document found on the body of the Anti-Treaty repub-
lican Liam Mellows after his death in the occupation of the Four Courts.
“We have been tirelessly impressing on our leaders,” Tegart quoted Roy as
arguing, “the necessity of acting on the lines which the Irish Republican
has discovered through his own experience.”88
3 Bengal Terrorism and International

Communism: M. N. Roy
Although IPI’s primary interest in M. N. Roy was as one of the founders
of the communist movement in India, he also formed part of a global
network of Bengali anticolonial activists who, while they explored and
adopted new ideologies overseas, also retained links to revolutionaries in

Bengal. This is not to suggest that these revolutionaries exclusively or even
primarily associated with fellow comrades from Bengal. Indeed, as histori-
ans have recently emphasized, alliances between Indian anticolonialists
overseas extended across regional, linguistic, class, and religious boundar-
ies.89 Rather, it is to contend that by the 1920s, there was a discernable
thread of nationalists from the Bengali revolutionary tradition involved in
various radical and anticolonial movements across the globe, which
impacted both revolutionary politics in Bengal and the growth of imperial
intelligence.
These connections could at times be a detriment, as organizational
rivalries and personal animosities from Bengal were transplanted overseas.
When the American radical Agnes Smedley became a compatriot of Bengali
revolutionaries in Mexico during the Great War, in the words of her biog-
rapher “she opened herself up to the deception, betrayal, and internecine
warfare endemic among” them. M. N. Roy later used rumors of Smedley’s
sexual encounters with other Indian men to discredit fellow Bengali revo-
lutionary and rival Virendranath Chattopadhyay, who would later marry
her.90 Yet these networks also helped foster contacts with revolutionaries
across the globe, who shared news, propaganda, and efforts to export
weapons to India.91 This is illustrated by the global connections between
the revolutionaries Sailendranath Ghose, Rash Behari Bose, and Taraknath
Das. Sailendranath Ghose, a Jugantar member, fled Bengal in 1916, was
indicted in the Hindu Conspiracy Case, and became the leader of the
Friends of Freedom for India (FOFI) in New York City after the First
World War. For a decade, he was active in anticolonial politics on the East
Coast and was particularly eager to form alliances with Irish nationalists.92
Rash Behari Bose, suspected of involvement in the bombing attack on
Lord Hardinge, fled to Japan in 1915, where for the next three decades he
coupled the campaign for Indian independence with enthusiastic support
for Japan’s imperial expansion in Asia.93 Taraknath Das, a member of the
Anushilan Samiti, had left Bengal to avoid arrest in 1905. Das continued
his involvement in radical politics in the United States, where he founded
the Free Hindusthan newspaper and was later convicted in the 1917
Hindu-German Conspiracy case.94
In 1922, IPI reported that Das was in touch with Rash Behari Bose and
also maintained a “fairly extensive” correspondence with revolutionaries
in Bengal.95 In 1923, the British consul in Tokyo reported that Rash
Behari Bose carried on an “extensive correspondence” with Indian revo-
204 M. SILVESTRI
lutionaries overseas.96 This included Sailendranath Ghose of the FOFI. In

1923, the consul reported that the visiting card of the Japanese politician
Sennosuke Yokota was found in Ghose’s office, and that he had also been
mentioned in letters to Rash Behari Bose.97 Although Ghose was increas-
ingly regarded by many overseas revolutionaries as unscrupulous and
untrustworthy, particularly regarding financial matters, he continued to
receive assistance from Irish republican and communist organizations in
the United States, and also to correspond with Bengali revolutionaries. In
November 1929, the Calcutta Police Special Branch intercepted a letter
from the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose, whom imperial
intelligence authorities considered to be a “Bengali terrorist,” asking
Ghose to “send by the return mail a list of newspapers conducted by Irish-
Americans, American Jews and Russian Americans? These people have
decided Anti-Government views and if we could establish contact with
them it would be of great help to our Cause.”98
The interception of correspondence and the use of agents to monitor
and report on individuals’ activities was extended to Indians overseas who,
like Bose, were associated with revolutionaries but were not revolutionar-
ies themselves. In an SIS memo which was shared with IPI, an Indian
informant provided information on one Sudhindra Bose during a 1921
visit to Shanghai. Sudhindra, who had earlier corresponded with Rash
Behari Bose, had a letter of introduction from a Japanese publicist, called
at the Japanese consul, and hosted a dinner for Japanese guests. While he
“talked at length about non-cooperation” with the informant, he stated
that he favored neither violence nor non-violence as a strategy for Indian
nationalism. Rather, he told the dinner guests that his focus was to high-
light around the globe “British injustice and brutality.” Sudhindra Bose’s
Shanghai visit provided IPI with a powerful example of the global extent
of Indian, and specifically Bengali, anticolonial networks, as he exhibited a
clipping from a Norwegian newspaper about noncooperation, and stated
“that one of the Bengalis working in the Baltic province [sic] was carrying
several pictures showing the Amritsar atrocities.”99
One of the most prominent Bengali revolutionaries who crossed bor-
ders and shifted identities during and after the Great War was M. N. Roy.
Roy, in common with many Indian anticolonial activists whom Kris
Manjapra terms the “Swadeshi avant-garde,” not only helped forge net-
works of revolutionary intellectuals but also sought through his extensive
travels to remake the map of the globe.100 Roy first came to Calcutta fol-
lowing the death of his father in 1905. He was arrested for his involve-
ment in a small-scale dacoity at a rural train station and also implicated in

the 1910 Howrah Conspiracy Case.101 During the First World War, Roy
became the lieutenant of the Jugantar leader Jatin Mukherjee and was sent
to Batavia to negotiate with the German consul the shipment of arms and
ammunition in support of an uprising in Bengal.
After the failure of the Indo-German Conspiracy, Roy traveled to the
United States rather than returning to Bengal. Arriving first in California,
he subsequently traveled to New York City, where he made contact with
Indian anticolonial activists and intensively read the works of Marx in the
New York Public Library. In 1917, Roy helped found the Socialist Party
of Mexico. In Mexico, he also had considerable contact with German con-
sular officials, including some who had participated in the abortive arms-
smuggling efforts to Indian revolutionaries. He studied German, and also
met the Soviet envoy Mikhail Borodin, who invited him to attend the
Second Congress of the Communist International in Petrograd.102 Roy
traveled to Berlin in early 1919, where he met Soviet representatives and
Indian communists, the most prominent of whom was Virendranath
Chattodadhyay, known as “Viren.” Roy became the founder of the
Communist Party of India in 1920, and spent the following decade in
Europe, mostly in Berlin, where he published the CPI’s newspa-
per Vanguard.
Roy’s political trajectory anticipated that of many Bengali revolutionar-
ies, as he moved from militant nationalism to international communism,
abandoning what he later termed “the austere ruthlessness of revolution-
ary terrorism.”103 Yet even as he emerged as the most prominent Indian
communist of the 1920s, and formulated his own distinctive vision for the
role of the non-Western world in a communist revolution, he did not
completely sunder his ties to his revolutionary past. Roy was firmly estab-
lished within the global networks of Indian nationalists, especially those
from Bengal. When he first arrived in the United States, Dhanagopal
Mukherjee, the younger brother of the Calcutta revolutionary Jadugopal
Mukherjee, provided not only comradeship but also the suggestion that
Bhattacharji change his name to M. N. Roy, which was not associated with
any particular caste.
In similar fashion, Roy turned to Bengali revolutionary organizations
as potential conduits for the spread of communism in India. Roy’s efforts
to promote communism was one of the reasons he was subjected to
intensive surveillance by British imperial intelligence agencies during his
more than a decade in Europe. Described by the Bengal Police
206 M. SILVESTRI
Intelligence Branch as a “most dangerous revolutionary,” Roy was

regarded as a source of both communist ideas and weapons in India. The
surveillance of Roy demonstrates not only the cosmopolitan and global
networks of Indian anticolonialists, but also the British need for global
surveillance involving multiple intelligence entities. The surveillance of
anticolonial activists such as Roy helped spur international cooperation
between British and French authorities.104 Within the British Empire, in
addition to information from IPI and Indian intelligence agencies in
New Delhi and Calcutta, intelligence from MI5 and Scotland Yard was
also utilized in order to understand Roy’s activities and their significance.
From 1921 to 1923, IPI prepared monthly intelligence reports on the
Indian Communist Party, which focused on Roy’s activities. These were
circulated to the India Office and the Intelligence Bureau in New Delhi,
as well as to “Major V.,” former Indian Police officer Valentine Vivian of
SIS.105 By this time, Bengal revolutionaries detained under the Defence of
India Act during the Great War had been released under a 1919 amnesty,
and while some rejected the insurrectionist strategies they had pursued,
many renewed their involvement in revolutionary groups. A large number
of memoirs, biographies, and histories about the early revolutionaries
appearing in the 1920s challenged colonial assumptions about “unmar-
tial” Bengalis and introduced a new generation of Bengali Hindus to the
actions and sacrifices of these nationalists.106
Roy believed that this younger generation could provide a fertile audi-
ence for communism and made use of revolutionary networks to spread
anticolonial ideology to them. Sometimes corresponding in English,
sometimes in Bengali, Roy wrote to a number of prominent leaders of the
first generation of Bengali revolutionaries, arguing that the Indian masses
had acquired the necessary class consciousness for proletarian revolution
and asking for their assistance in circulating Vanguard in India.
In July 1922, Roy published an article in the communist International
Press Correspondence that discussed the postwar “recrudescence of activity
among the secret terrorist groups” in India. IPI paraphrased Roy’s
remarks as follows: “These terrorist groups are gradually collecting their
scattered forces since repression was relaxed after the inauguration of the
reforms, and are now appearing in the field. These secret societies still
believe in the success of their old tactics, whose efficacy has been put to
the test and failed.” Roy noted that many revolutionaries were now join-
ing the Indian National Congress while continuing to maintain separate
revolutionary organizations: “This individual participation has gone so far
in the province of Bengal, where the secret societies were strongest that
the majority of the local Congress organizations is controlled by ex-mem-
bers of the terrorist organizations. They are all in Congress because they
have been incapable of evolving by themselves a better or more effective
method of struggle.” IPI noted that Roy had recently expressed similar
views in letters to Bengali revolutionaries such as Pulin Das, the founder
of the Dacca Anushilan Samiti, and Jadugopal Mukherjee, the elder
brother of Roy’s Stanford contact Dhanagopal.107
Roy was aided by his emissary, fellow Bengali revolutionary Nalini
Gupta, who traveled to Calcutta in early 1922 and made contact with Das,
Mukherjee, and other revolutionaries. According to one intelligence
report, Pulin Das quickly agreed to cooperate with Roy, but by November
1922, Roy was warning an associate in Calcutta to be wary of the former
Anushilan Samiti leader.108 Early in the following year, Roy lamented that
he had not found the right man in Bengal.109 One of IPI’s files on Roy
includes an extract from the Intelligence Bureau’s weekly report, which
stated that Roy was in touch with “well known figures” connected to both
of the major revolutionary parties in Bengal, Jugantar, and Anushilan: “At
present, however, both sides are working at cross purposes. The Bengal
revolutionaries want Roy’s money without definitely committing them-
selves to follow his programme, while Roy makes financial assistance con-
ditional on agreement with his principles.”110 Later in 1923, Bengal Police
IB officer P. C. Bamford observed that while Roy and the Bengal revolu-
tionaries held markedly different anticolonial ideologies, they were “both
prepared mutually to assist each other toward the common goal, which is
the expulsion of the British from India.”111
This alliance of convenience between Roy and his erstwhile revolution-
ary colleagues continued through the 1920s. Police intelligence reports
frequently refer to his efforts to assist the revolutionaries through the
importation of weapons. Arms smuggling, the subject of the following
chapter, was of particular concern to the Bengal Police, since repeating
handguns, the staple of political assassinations in this era, enabled the
revolutionaries to target officials ranging from humble Indian police
inspectors to colonial governors.112 In a 1926 Intelligence Branch compi-
lation of revolutionaries who had been detained without trial, a half-dozen
of fifty “irreconcilables” were listed as having contact with Roy in arms-
smuggling efforts, while numerous others were listed as having contact
with Soviet Russia, including a “scheme to send young men to Russia to
208 M. SILVESTRI
be trained on Bolshevik lines.”113 Bengali revolutionaries in turn took Roy

into their confidence regarding their plans to assassinate British officials.
In August 1923, Jadugopal Mukherjee sent Roy a cable regarding a
Jugantar plot to assassinate Charles Tegart, one of the several attempts
which the revolutionaries made on his life.114
There are several significant aspects to Roy’s relationship with Bengal
revolutionaries in the 1920s. First, although Roy had clearly moved away
from revolutionary nationalism in terms of his anticolonial ideology, the
Bengali revolutionaries were always eclectic in their choice of inspiration
and ideologies.115 A revolutionary leaflet from this time titled “Utho,
Jago” (“Arise, Awake”) not only invoked the early heroes of the Bengali
revolutionary movement such as Kudiram Bose but also asked young
Bengalis to “think of De Valera of Ireland, Lenin of Russia, the ancient
and well-known Mazzini of Italy, Garibaldi, the Rajput heroes of India,
and other heroes of the world.”116 Although the mass conversion of revo-
lutionaries to the idea of communist revolution did not occur until a
decade later, by the mid-1920s, the tracts that Roy and his associates
smuggled into India were avidly read by revolutionaries in Jugantar and
the Anushilan Samiti. IPI noted that by 1923, three communist publica-
tions were circulating in Bengal, all “mostly run by former revolutionar-
ies.”117 Although only one of the fifty-four “irreconcilable” revolutionaries
held in detention in 1926 was considered to be a “Bolshevik,” figures such
as Narayan Chandra Banarji demonstrated the intersection of communist
and revolutionary ideologies in mid-1920s Bengal.118 Originally a mem-
ber of the Anushilan Samiti, Banarji later joined Jugantar, and was believed
to be involved in a plan to assassinate police officers; according to the
Bengal Police IB, he “was also concerned in the dissemination of Bolshevik
literature and had arms under his control.”119
Many revolutionaries undoubtedly saw a practical side to their alliances
with Indian communists overseas, even if they did not embrace their ideol-
ogy. In 1923, some revolutionaries contacted not only Roy but also his
rival in the overseas organization of Indian communism, Abani Mukherjee.
Mukherjee was in touch with German seamen who were smuggling arms,
and according to the Bengal Police IB, had obtained a number of new
German automatic pistols. “Abani Mukherjee must have had some cre-
dentials in order to be entertained by revolutionists after Roy’s broad-
casted warning against him,” P. C. Bamford observed, “and it is difficult
to conceive of any credentials which would carry more weight in the
Jugantar Party than a batch of good automatic pistols.”120
Although the Intelligence Branch was correct to conclude that the

appeal of weapons to Bengali revolutionaries was greater than that of com-
munist ideology, colonial authorities were slow to recognize the impact of
communism in the province. In spite of the fears of the Government of
India of outside communist influence, the Government of Bengal had
been initially skeptical of the need for an officer dedicated to monitoring
Bolshevik activities. Both the Intelligence Branch and the Calcutta Police
Special Branch agreed that the presence of such as officer, as H. L.
Stephenson of the Bengal government wrote in December 1919, was “not
only unnecessary, but would probably be mischievous” because there was
very little evidence of the existence of any Bolshevism in the strictly proper
sense of the term in Bengal…. But if we have a special officer running round
the province trying to justify his existence by smelling out Bolsheviks and
explaining to officials and probably non-officials what Bolsheviks are and
how they may be known, he will prepare the ground admirably for the
spread of Bolshevik literature and tenets, when they do come.121
Within a few months, however, intelligence agencies in the province

became much more concerned about the potential impact of communism.
Deputy Commissioner of the Calcutta Port Police F. D. Bartly was desig-
nated to supervise the work of two inspectors, one European and one
Indian, who would board all ships entering the port to assist police pass-
port officers in scrutinizing new arrivals to Calcutta and customs officials
dealing with “objectionable” literature with a particular eye to intercept-
ing communist tracts. In March 1920, the Intelligence Branch assumed
responsibility for the supervision of passengers and literature arriving in
the port of Calcutta.122
In contrast to the Government of Bengal, IPI quickly considered
communism to be a potent threat to be monitored in connection with
Indians overseas. Indeed, for much of the interwar period, IPI, like
SIS and MI5, was “preoccupied with the challenge of international
Communism.”123 The extensive IPI archive on Roy and the nascent
Indian communist movement in the early 1920s provides a detailed exam-
ple of imperial intelligence work regarding revolutionary movements.124
As was the case in Bengal, the information from members of the revolu-
tionary groups formed the basis of IPI’s dossier on Roy. The willingness
of a close associate of Roy to provide information to IPI allowed the
authorities to maintain a detailed picture of his activities. Letters in India,
210 M. SILVESTRI
as well as the United Kingdom, were routinely intercepted, and the agent
was able to photograph letters in Roy’s possession as well as providing
reports on the revolutionary’s activities.125
Although particularly in the early years of the revolutionary movement
in Bengal, revolutionaries could be surprisingly careless about the infor-
mation they committed to paper, they increasingly took elaborate precau-
tions to preserve secrecy and evade imperial surveillance. In August 1922,
the Calcutta communist leader Muzaffar Ahmad warned Roy to be careful
about writing to potential distributors of his publications in India, “as
many letters were being tampered with in India when addressed to mer-
chants.” Ahmad signed the letter “Aboni Mitra” and disguised his hand-
writing. In another letter to Roy, Ahmad stated that the above name and
“Sailen” would be the two aliases he would use in the future, and also sent
Roy a cipher telegram.126 By 1923, Roy was sending correspondence to
intermediaries in Calcutta rather than directly to recipients, such as a letter
for nationalist leader C. R. Das which he mailed to one T. N. Roy of
Calcutta, with instructions to hand it personally to Das. Roy also requested
that Das address all communication to “M. E. Taylor” at a Berlin postal
box.127 (Roy’s letter was nonetheless photographed by IPI’s agent.) Roy
deployed a similar strategy to send copies of Vanguard to Southeast Asia
in early 1923, again with assistance from intermediaries in Calcutta. Copies
were sent in a German mail bag to an address in Calcutta, and from there
were “probably placed in the colony’s mail to avoid detection.” The
packet, which was disguised as catalogues from Berlin, escaped the notice
of the censor in Penang.128
4 Shifting Revolutionary Identities: Hugh

Roschis Alias Hugo Espinoza Alias Abdur Raschid
Roy was the best known of revolutionaries whose connections to global
revolutionary and anticolonial movements brought them into contact
with Bengali revolutionaries, but there were numerous others. One of the
most eclectic characters in the global story of the Bengali revolutionary
movement was the man known as Hugo Espinoza. Like Roy, Espinoza
was subject to the surveillance of multiple imperial intelligence agencies,
and his revolutionary career further illustrates how imperial authorities
feared the intersection of diverse anticolonial movements with the Bengali
revolutionaries.
Espinoza was born Hugh Roschis in the port city of Libau, Latvia, then
part of the Russian Empire, in 1886. In 1900, Hugo and his parents emi-
grated to Boston, where his father Leopold became a naturalized American
citizen. Espinoza’s parents seem to have separated, and his mother (whose
name is not identified) emigrated to Vienna, where she was still residing in
the late 1920s.129 Espinoza either accompanied or followed her to Vienna,
as the Government of Bengal described him as being raised there. Although
much is unknown about Espinoza’s life, it is clear that he spoke English
and German, and possibly Asian languages as well; he traveled extensively
in Europe and Asia, and by the early 1920s had become involved in revo-
lutionary politics. It is not clear when he adopted the name “Hugo
Espinoza,” although he was known variously as Rogers, Roschkis, and
latterly as Abdur Raschid.130
Espinoza may have been introduced to Indian revolutionary politics
after the First World War in New York City, where he shared an apartment
with the Punjabi nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai. He was involved in
“intrigues” with a Bengali student named Porendra Narayan Sinha and
with John Quinn, an Irish-American lawyer, politician, and art collector
who employed Sinha as a clerk.131 Quinn may have been a source of intel-
ligence information about Espinoza, since he was also a casual informant
for SIS.132
Espinoza came to the attention of intelligence authorities in India pri-
marily through his connections to both M. N. Roy and Rash Behari Bose.
He seemed to epitomize the global threat posed by Bengali revolutionar-
ies, as well as the interconnections between different revolutionary move-
ments. Described by the Intelligence Bureau as “a German-Russian Jew,”
Espinoza also fit the colonial stereotype of foreign “Semitic” agitators
stirring up communist revolution in India.133 He corresponded with Roy
from Japan by writing to the post box for the Indian Communist Party in
Zurich. The letter was passed on to Indian Political Intelligence by their
agent within Roy’s organization and reproduced in full in IPI’s report on
the Indian Communist Party of 22 December 1922.134 Espinoza wrote
of his travels through China, where he attempted to reach Tibet and even-
tually India, but war prevented him from getting any farther than
Chungking. His efforts to visit Calcutta, to which he had been invited by
Abani Mukherjee, Roy’s rival in the Indian communist movement, were
thwarted when British officials refused to grant him a visa. Espinoza
updated Roy on his correspondence with Indians in New York City (who
were possibly affiliated with Sailendranath Ghose’s Friends of Freedom for
212 M. SILVESTRI
India) and asked Roy for the address of a Communist Party member in
Mexico, noting that “I also hear occasionally from friends in India.”
Through his association with Roy, Espinoza also had connections to
communist revolutionaries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas; through his
connection with Rash Behari Bose, he became involved with Bengali revo-
lutionaries. In early 1923, British consular official C. J. Davidson, an
important source of intelligence on Indian revolutionaries in Japan,
observed that Bose enjoyed an intimate relationship with Espinoza, “who
has been living in Tokio for some time without any visible means of sup-
port and is almost certainly connected in some way with the Bolsheviks.”135
In April 1924, the Director of the Intelligence Bureau in Shanghai
reported that Espinoza was “constantly mixing” with two Punjabis named
Harbaksh Singh and Gian Singh, who were two of the “leading agitators
at Shanghai.”136 Like Espinoza, Harbaksh Singh, described by the
Singapore Police as an “ardent seditionist,” had connections to Japan; in
early 1923, he had opened a shop with a Japanese man that displayed
photos of leaders of the Akali movement in chains and other nationalist
images, which made a “considerable impact on Sikh opinion in
Shanghai.”137 At the same time, British intelligence sources reported that
Espinoza worked for “the Counter Espionage Department of the Soviet
Government.”138
Worryingly for British authorities, Espinoza became involved in plots
to smuggle arms to Bengal revolutionaries. Like much about Hugo
Espinoza’s life, there is much that is unclear about his involvement with
the revolutionaries. The Government of Bengal wrote that he played “an
important, if obscure, part,” in a “formidable conspiracy” to smuggle
arms into India via East Asia in the mid-1920s.139 While in Shanghai in
April 1924, he was reported to be in “affluent circumstances,” and told
Harbaksh Singh “that he must be in India by the spring of next year.” In
the following month, Espinoza, unable to obtain a passport, returned to
Japan; he was permitted to return because Rash Behari Bose “stated that
he knew Espinoza personally and was prepared to stand guarantee for
him.” Before leaving Shanghai, Espinoza also told the agent that he
needed to consult with Bose about an alternate plan for arms smuggling
since the expected messenger from India had not materialized.140
In July and August 1924, Indian intelligence officials became aware of
large-scale seizures of arms on ships to Southeast Asia, in part through
reports in newspapers such as the Statesman of Calcutta. On 7 July 1924,
the SS Schlesien arrived at Colombo, but instead of machinery parts was
found to have a cargo of 100 sporting rifles and 288 automatic pistols,
along with over 28,000 rounds of pistol ammunition. IPI, after examining
the Home Office’s arms-smuggling files, saw these as part of a pattern of
“large consignments” of arms shipped mostly from Hamburg to Asian
destinations, particularly Hong Kong. The agent for these shipments was
a Chinese man named Choy Loy (also known as Tsoi Loi Fat), who was
married to an English woman named Milton, whose brother served as
Loy’s agent in Hamburg.141
The Bengal Police IB was convinced that Bengali revolutionaries were
involved with the seized arms shipment at Colombo. A police source was
reportedly told by Subhas Chandra Bose that the arms seized formed part
of shipments intended for revolutionaries in Bengal and for which he had
sent Rs. 50,000 to a foreign country. The source further reported that the
arms would be sent first to Burma or China, and smuggled from there into
India. Bose allegedly told the source that the smugglers were concealing
the arms in “country craft engaged in coastal trade” as well as hollowed-
out tree trunks imported by timber merchants. He added that the revolu-
tionaries “had recently successfully smuggled some false packing cases
from Rangoon to Calcutta in order to see whether the customs authorities
were alert.”142
The Bengal Police IB and the Intelligence Bureau both considered
Espinoza to be an integral part of this conspiracy to smuggle arms across
the Indian Ocean inter-regional area. He arrived in Calcutta on 28
September 1924, although authorities were not aware of his presence until
over a month later. He was arrested and detained on 8 November under the
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance (1924), shortly after Subhas
Chandra Bose and seventeen other nationalists were arrested on the same
day in late October. Papers in his possession included “Bolshevik docu-
ments which indicated that he was operating along propaganda lines.”143
The judges reviewing Espinoza’s case concurred that he was a crucial
figure in revolutionary arms-smuggling networks. He was detained with-
out trial for almost four years, until at the end of 1927, the Government
of Bengal began making arrangements to release him. Colonial authorities
faced the problem, however, of what to do with the Latvian-born revolu-
tionary. “It is considered most undesirable to set free this man anywhere
near Bengal or indeed anywhere in India,” the Government of Bengal
wrote, “and the Government of India will probably agree that it is inadvis-
able that he should go back to the Far East.” Espinoza expressed a desire
to return to America, where he had two brothers, but it seemed an unlikely
214 M. SILVESTRI
possibility that the United States would accept a communist revolutionary

involved with international arms smuggling.
The Government of Bengal hoped that Espinoza’s religious beliefs,
which, along with his anticolonial ideology, had shifted during his border-
crossing career as a revolutionary, would provide a way to remove him
from India. While he embraced communism, he also apparently main-
tained a strong interest in religion. (He had written to Roy that his objec-
tive in traveling to Tibet in 1922 had been to study Buddhism.) After his
arrival in Calcutta, he adopted the name Abdur Raschid and converted to
Islam. Raschid further expressed a desire to visit Mecca, which formed the
basis of a plan outlined by the Government of Bengal:
Failing permission to return to America, Abdur Raschid himself is willing to

visit Mecca. He has been a devout Mahommedan (Sunni) ever since he
arrived in India, and to all appearances he is sincere in his religion, and fer-
vent in his daily prayers. If the Government of India have no objection and
can secure the consent of the Hedjaz authorities, the Government of Bengal
propose to send Abdur Raschid to Mecca, paying his expenses there, and
giving him a sum sufficient for about three months, by which time he will
probably be able to find employment there or elsewhere.144
The Government of India agreed that Raschid should be released, but at

a time when Indian pilgrims on the Hajj had organized daily protest meet-
ings against the Indian government and shipping companies, the presence
of a committed revolutionary in Arabia was most unwelcome.145 The
Indian government thus strongly objected to any attempt to send him “to
the Hejaz, where he would be liable to cause further trouble.”146
Raschid was prevented from spending further time in prison when
American authorities agreed in early 1928 to grant him a passport and
leave to enter the country.147 His passport, under the name Hugo Roschkis,
was valid for only two months and for a single journey to the United
States, and he sailed for Boston on the City of Salisbury on 12 March
1928. Even so, the Government of India took the steps to warn the
Governor-General of Sudan, the High Commissioner of Egypt, and
French authorities in Algeria to prevent Raschid from disembarking.148
His return to the United States seems to have ended his career as a revo-
lutionary; Raschid, who settled in New York City, married and raised a
family, does not appear on a 1931 IPI list of 157 “Indian extremists” in
the United States.149
5 Internationalism and Militancy: Subhas

Chandra Bose
The clashing perspectives of the India Office and the Government of
Bengal on the question of the deportation of Hugo Espinoza were repli-
cated in a number of other instances. Although the India Office believed
that Sailendranath Ghose’s influence of as a revolutionary agitator was
virtually nil by the mid-1920s—one India Office official commented that
he was “extinct in New York”—IPI and the Government of Bengal con-
tinued to strenuously object to his return to India until the mid-1930s.
They both expressed concern about his wide range of revolutionary con-
tacts, including Irish nationalists and communists such as Roy, and feared
his impact upon revolutionaries in Bengal. In 1929, IPI described him as
“very dangerous” and opined that “he will resort to violence, or at all
events encourage others to do so.”150 It was only in the mid-1930s, when
Ghose, according to IPI, had “completely dropped out of politics” and
was “leading a hand-to-mouth existence,” that he was allowed to return
to India. Ghose and his wife Rebecca Ghose (née Kabrinsky) were allowed
to return, but only after both pledging not to engage in any revolutionary
activity.151 Rebecca Ghose was subjected to police surveillance as well, par-
ticularly after she became involved in the re-opening in 1939 of an orga-
nization called the Tarun Samiti, which had caused “immense trouble”
during the civil disobedience campaign.152
A similar clash of perspectives among imperial officials regarding the
ideologies and revolutionary potential of nationalists within and outside of
India was demonstrated in the case of Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose, as we
have seen, was regarded by intelligence officers in Bengal as a Bengali ter-
rorist leader and an orchestrator of arms shipments. Yet as much as
Government of Bengal officials feared his revolutionary potential within
Bengal, they were relatively ambivalent about the journeys he took to
Europe for health reasons in 1933–1934 and 1935–1936. Bose had been
detained under Regulation III of 1818 and held in Mandalay Prison from
1924 to 1927; he was arrested again soon after the resumption of Gandhi’s
civil disobedience campaign in 1932. While he was allowed to travel to
Europe in February 1933 to seek medical treatment, he was transported
directly in an ambulance from his prison in the Central Provinces to the
port of Bombay, and not formally released from detention until he was
onboard the ship.153
216 M. SILVESTRI
The Government of Bengal had no objection to Bose traveling to

Europe, believing that “his connection, if any, with revolutionaries abroad”
was “remote.” There was a broad consensus on this issue among imperial
officials in London, New Delhi, and Calcutta, who believed that Bose’s
presence in Continental Europe would “not be likely seriously to affect
the terrorist movement” in Bengal.154 The Viceroy expressed concern,
however, about Bose’s contacts with Indians living in England, which he
argued posed a “serious risk of his contaminating Bengali students and
keeping up connections with Bengal through them.”155 This fear of Bose
utilizing expatriate networks of students to encourage and assist “Bengali
terrorism” prevented him from traveling to Britain on these journeys.
Bose’s passport was marked invalid for travel to Britain (as well as
Germany), even though as a British subject he could not be legally pre-
vented from entering the United Kingdom.156 (Bose did travel to Éire,
however, and counted the meetings he had there with Eamon De Valera
and other Irish republicans as among the highlights of his time in
Europe).157
Although in this instance Bose was prevented from entering the UK, he
was subjected to surveillance during the almost four years he spent in
Europe between 1933 and 1936. After Bose lectured at the American
Cultural Club in Berlin in 1933, two British agents chided the organizers
for allowing the anti-British content of Bose’s talk.158 IPI carried out sur-
veillance of Bose in conjunction with SIS and issued periodic reports on
his activities throughout his time in Europe. IPI chief Philip Vickery
concluded based on agents’ reports that Bose’s goal was “to establish a
chain of Indian propaganda centres throughout Europe,” with a head-
quarters, possibly in Berlin, “where Indians might be given political, com-
mercial, and, possibly, military training.”159 Although concerns about
Bose’s involvement in arranging weapon shipments to Bengali revolution-
aries occasionally surfaced, the major emphasis of IPI’s reporting on Bose
was on his interactions with communism rather than revolutionary
nationalism.160
As Bose’s biographer, Sugata Bose, has observed, the nationalist lead-
er’s career “required a constant negotiation of the global forces of impe-
rialism and nationalism, fascism and communism.”161 Although Subhas
Bose’s interest in communism had occasionally surfaced in Bengal Police
IB reports, it was particularly emphasized by IPI, which, as we have
seen, privileged the threat posed by communist rather than nationalist
revolutionaries.162 Vickery was, however, perceptive enough to note that
Bose was not an “orthodox communist.” In 1933, he offered a more

nuanced assessment of Bose’s attraction to fascism as well as commu-
nism, based on “information received from a very reliable source”:
It would appear that though Subhas Chandra Bose has many Communist
leanings, he cannot, strictly speaking, be accounted a Communist; for
instance, though entirely at one with the Communists in their fight against
Imperialism, he denounces their attitude towards Nationalism in general
and the Indian National Congress in particular. He himself is bitterly
opposed to the non-violent tactics of Gandhi and the present Congress lead-
ership and is of opinion that a radical change of policy is indicated: that such
a change must be towards the extreme left, embracing if need be the use of
revolutionary and terrorist methods. He would like to introduce a new
political philosophy into India, which would be neither Communist nor
pacifist, but something more akin to the Nationalist spirit of the
Fascist ideal.163
IPI and the India Office also closely monitored Bose’s literary output
with an eye on its impact in India and abroad. Upon learning that Bose
was writing a new book, which was published as The Indian Struggle in
1935, IPI obtained summaries of the chapters “from a confidential
source.”164 The India Office described the book as “very clear and read-
able,” but also “from cover to cover” as “anti-British.” The India Office
and the Government of India took little time to decide that The Indian
Struggle should be banned, and it was proscribed under the Sea Customs
Act on 21 January 1935. Although IPI noted that the book reflected
Bose’s interest in diverse political ideologies and seemed to outline a
future political program that aimed at a synthesis of communism and fas-
cism, IPI and officials in the India Office and the Government of India
particularly objected to Bose’s discussion of the Bengali revolutionary
movement. “This book will be troublesome,” IPI wrote, due to Bose’s
skill at “distorting facts.” Vickery characterized a passage that described
“acts of terrorism” (Bose’s words) after the Chittagong Armoury Raid as
“acts of retaliation or reprisal rather than aggression” as “a monstrous
perversion of the facts.”165 IPI’s analysis led the Government of India to
conclude that “all this will undoubtedly directly encourage terrorist meth-
ods.”166 The India Office notified Bose’s publisher, Wishart & Co., that its
proscription was “taken on the ground that the tendency of the book as a
whole is to encourage methods of terrorism and direct action.”167
* * *
218 M. SILVESTRI
The individuals discussed in this chapter—M. N. Roy, Hugo Espinoza,

and Subhas Chandra Bose—displayed many of the common features of
anticolonial activists in the interwar era. They were geographically mobile
and their identities were fluid. Their political visions, in differing ways,
were internationalist. Yet they were also linked by their relationship to
revolutionary politics in Bengal and illustrate the connections of the revo-
lutionaries to anticolonialists worldwide. Roy and Espinoza made active
efforts to introduce the revolutionaries to communist ideology and to
supply them with the arms they were eager to obtain. Bose was not the
terrorist leader that Bengal Police intelligence imagined him to be, but his
nationalist vision did not exclude the use of force, and he wrote with sym-
pathy about fellow Bengali Hindus who took up arms against the British.
All three were also subject to intensive surveillance by imperial intelli-
gence agencies; even outside India, their movements were tracked, their
associates noted, and their correspondence intercepted and photographed.
They were subject to arrest and deportation, and in Bose’s case, barred
from the United Kingdom. The monitoring of these revolutionaries illus-
trates the connections of the Bengal Police with imperial intelligence
agencies and the effectiveness of relatively small imperial intelligence
agencies such as IPI in these efforts to carry out surveillance on Indian
anticolonialists.
While the goal of Roy, Espinoza, and Rash Behari Bose to arrange
large-scale arms shipments to the Bengali revolutionaries were
unsuccessful, revolutionaries utilized other efforts in their quest to weap-
ons with which to resist the Raj. The ways in which European and Asian
maritime workers contributed to this process will be explored in the fol-
lowing chapter.

London
CS Chief Secretary
University

IO India Office
Pol Political
Sec. Secretary
Eur. C 235, APAC BL
Bengal, 1995)
Notes
1. Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
2. M.I.5 B.L. Volume XXI. (Indian Volume.) (Rev. ed., 1921), 28–29.
3. Declaration of intention to naturalize of Heramba L. Gupta, 28 January
1910, Charleston, SC. www.ancestryinstitution.com. Accessed 19
September 2018.
4. Mansfield Cumming (“C”) to J. W. Hose, IO, 13 June 1921,
5. IPI directed the India Office to burn all remaining copies of the original
Black List, though fortunately for historians one survived in IPI’s archives.
IPI to Peel, IO, nd [1928]. P&J No. 444 of 1928, L/P&J/6/1955,
APAC BL.
Modern Asian Studies 47:6 (2013), 1782–1811.
7. Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial
State in India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017), 4.
220 M. SILVESTRI
8. Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (New

Delhi and London: Routledge, 2010).
9. Michele Louro, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and
Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018); and Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah, eds., The
Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917–
1939 (New Delhi: SAGE, 2015).
10. For the shift in revolutionaries’ ideologies, see David M. Laushey, Bengal
Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of Regional Nationalism in India,
1905–1942 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1975).
11. Two important exceptions are Daniel Brückenhaus’ studies of the coop-
eration between British, French, and German authorities in policing revo-
lutionaries in Europe, and Kate O’Malley’s analysis of Indian Political
Intelligence (IPI). Daniel Brückenhaus, “The Origins of Trans-Imperial
Policing: British-French Government Co-operation in the Surveillance of
Anti-colonists in Europe, 1905–25,” in Volker Barth and Roland
Cvetkovski, eds., Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870–1930
(London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 171–193; and Policing
Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of
Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017). Kate O’Malley, “Indian Political Intelligence (IPI): The monitor-
ing of real and possible danger?” in Eunan O’Halpin, Robert Armstrong
and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds., Intelligence, Statecraft and International Power.
Historical Studies XXV. (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press,
2006), 175–185; and Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical
Connections, 1919–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2008). See also Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the
Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (London: Harper Press, 2013),
1–29.
12. Ian H. Magedera, “Arrested Development: The Shape of ‘French India’
after the Treaties of Paris of 1763 and 1814,” Interventions 12:3 (2010),
331–343 (quotation on 333). See also the other essays in the same issue
of Interventions devoted to “French India.”
13. For the history of Chandernagore and its connections with nationalist
politics in Bengal, see Margaret A. Majumdar, “Bengal: The French
Connection,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 16:1&2
(2013), 27–50; and Sailendra Nath Sen, Chandernagore: From Bondage
to Freedom 1900–1955 (Delhi: Primus, 2012).
14. Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in
India 1900–1910 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 52–53; and
Sen, Chandernagore, 7–17.
15. Majumdar, “French Connection,” 32.
16. “Copy of a Report by Mr. S. Sen Gupta, Inspector of Police, on Special

Duty, on the Importation of Firearms through Chandernagore,” (1907)
in TIB III: 336–337.
18. C. A. Tegart, “Note on the Chandernagore Gang,” 5, GOB Home (Pol)
20. The handguns were a Royal Irish Constabulary .45 Webley and an
Osbourne .38. Heehs, Bomb in Bengal, 186 and 188.
21. C. A. Tegart, “Note on the Chandernagore Gang,” 7–8, GOB Home
22. Cited in Majumdar, “French Connection,” 32.
23. “List of Political Suspects in Bengal—Corrected up to the End of August
1912,” in TIB V: 533–538.
24. Note by E. H. Corbett, SP on special duty, Benares, 8 November 1915,
in TIB V: 187.
25. Zetland to Montagu, 3 October 1921, Montagu Papers, MSS Eur. D
523/32, APAC BL.
26. “A Brief Note on the Prabartak Sangha of Chandernagore,” [1925]
27. Heehs, Bomb in Bengal, 233 and 246; and C. A. Tegart, “Note on the
Situation in Chandernagore,” (1917) in TIB III: 276–279.
30. CS to GOB, Pol. Dept., to Sec. to GOI, Home, 26 September 1923,
in TIB III: 340.
32. Charles Tegart, “Note on the Chandernagore Gang,” 1–2 and 6, GOB
33. C. A. Tegart, “Note on the Situation in Chandernagore,” (1917) in TIB
III: 296–297. The Defence of India Act and Regulation III of 1818
allowed for detention without trial.
34. Charles Tegart, “Note on the Chandernagore Gang,” 6 and 17, GOB
35. Charles Tegart, “Note on the Chandernagore Gang,” 16–17, GOB
222 M. SILVESTRI

37. C. A. Tegart, “Note on the Situation in Chandernagore,” (1917) in TIB
III: 295–296.
38. “Searches made at Chandernagore on 1st December 1916,” Appendix A
to C. A. Tegart, “Note on the Situation in Chandernagore,” (1917) in
TIB III: 297–303.
39. Governor of the French Settlements in India to Governor of Bengal, 4
January 1924; and Customs notification, 2 August 1926, L/P&J/12/85,
APAC BL.
40. M. L. Bhattacharya, Calcutta, to G. C. Dutt, Deputy Director, Intelligence
Bureau, Government of India, New Delhi, 9 January 1965. I am grateful
to the late Sabyasachi Mukherjee, formerly of the Calcutta Police, for
providing me with a copy of this letter.
41. In 1861 the Government of India had assured the Governor of French
Possessions in India that no extradition for such offenses would take
place.
42. F. W. Duke, Officiating CS to GOB, to Sec. to GOI, Home, 10 October
1908. Enclosure to Andrew Fraser, Governor of Bengal, to Lord Minto,
Viceroy, 15 October 1908. MS 12,769, Minto Papers, National Library
of Scotland [hereafter NLS]; Hiren Chakrabarti, Political Protest in
Bengal: Boycott and Terrorism 1905–1918 (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1992), 229;
and Heehs, Bomb in Bengal, 205.
43. Andrew Fraser, Governor of Bengal, to Lord Minto, Viceroy, 15 October
1908. MS 12,769, Minto Papers, NLS.
44. P. E. S. Finney, “The Chandernagore Raid,” [nd] Indian Police
Collection, MSS Eur. F 161/39, APAC BL.
45. R. E. A. Ray commented that if the planned attacks had been successful,
they “would have brought about a state of chaos which defies imagina-
tion.” R. E. A. Ray, “Report on the Activities of Terrorists in Bengal dur-
ing the Period April to December 1930,” (1931) in TIB I: 613.
46. Tegart to Hugh Stephenson, Governor of Bihar & Orissa, 4 September
1930, Indian Police Collection, MSS Eur. F 161/39, APAC BL; and
Manini Chatterjee, Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930–1934
(Delhi: Penguin, 1999), 173 and 327. Subodh Ray stated that torture
was employed in an interview with Manini Chatterjee.
47. Tegart memoir, 222–223; and draft letter by Tegart regarding
Chandernagore Raid, nd [September 1930] Indian Police Collection,
MSS Eur. F 161/257, APAC BL.
48. Tegart memoir, 223. District Magistrate H. Quinton also described the
raid as “a sort of Commando British Police raid.” “Terrorism in
Bengal—A Memory,” Quinton Papers, SASC.

Papers, Photo Eur. 272, APAC BL.
Papers, Photo Eur. 272, APAC BL; and Chatterjee, Do and Die,
175–176.
51. To the dismay of British officials, the French Government refused to
allow two of the League of Nations’ anti-terrorism treaties to apply to
their overseas colonies such as Chandernagore. Mary Barton, “The
British Empire and International Terrorism: India’s Separate Path at the
League of Nations, 1934–1937,” Journal of British Studies 56 (April
2017), 361. The Government of India’s support for the League of
Nation’s anti-terrorism treaties are discussed in Chap. 6.
52. “List of Outrages, 1933. Part A,” in TIB VI: 1031.
10 March 1933, L/P&J/12/466, APAC BL.
54. R. E. A. Ray, notes on draft of To Guard My People, Ch. 18, pp. 21–22,
Indian Police Collection, MSS Eur. F 161/257, APAC BL.
56. The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in its early years was
deeply influenced by Bengali revolutionaries in the United Provinces.
Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence,
2015), 27.
57. “Terrorist Conspiracy in Bengal from 1st April to 31st December 1925,”
(1926) in TIB I: 464–466 and 472–473.
58. Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Indian Nationalism and the ‘World Forces’:
Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions of the Indian Freedom
Movement on the Eve of the First World War,” Journal of Global History
2:3 (2007), 325–344 (quotation on 326); and Shyamji Krishnavarma:
Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-Imperialism (London, New York and New
Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 162.
59. Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global
Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 152.
60. Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global
Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 2011).
61. Quoted in Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance and Indian
Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014), 48.
224 M. SILVESTRI
62. Peter Heehs, “Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism

63. M.I.5 B.L. Volume XXI. (Indian Volume.) (Rev. ed., 1921), 48–49.
64. Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism
and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017), 165; and Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and
Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire
1904–1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 325–328.
65. Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest.
66. Although written before the opening of the IPI archive, Popplewell,
Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 125–141, discusses in detail the cir-
cumstances which led to Wallinger’s appointment in London. Charles
Cleveland noted to the GOB that after he and Henry had corresponded
about the issue of sending a Scotland Yard officer to India in 1909, “a
special arrangement was made whereby an English official of the Indian
Police was sent home. The rest of this part of the business is extremely
confidential.” C. R. Cleveland, DCI to J. G. Cumming, CS to GOB, 27
November 1913, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 182 of 1914, WBSA.
67. MI5 recruited women from Oxford and London Universities in this
period. Wallinger to J. W. Hose, IO, 13 January 1926, L/P&J/12/34,
APAC BL; and Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The
Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 59–63.
68. Wallinger to J. W. Hose, IO, 13 January 1926, L/P&J/12/34, APAC
BL.
69. IPI to Findlater Stewart, IO, 28 February 1927, L/P&J/12/34, APAC
BL. Intelligence Bureau Director David Petrie praised IPI’s “indispens-
able” work on the Meerut case, particularly the information provided
through a “very effective liaison with other intelligence organizations in
England.” H. Haig, GOI Home, to Findlater Stewart, IO, 31 October
1933, L/P&J/12/40, APAC BL.
70. O’Malley, “Indian Political Intelligence,” 175–176; and O’Malley,
Ireland, India and Empire, 7.
71. Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, 4–5.
72. Harper, “Singapore 1915,” 1797.
73. See O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire.
74. The others were Philip Vickery, who joined IPI In 1915, and succeeded
Wallinger as its head in 1926; Paul Biggane (1922–1923); and Paul Adam
Hunter (1923).
75. Tegart’s biographer and Indian Police colleague J. C. Curry, concluded
that “Tegart owed much of his success as a policeman to the fact that he
dealt with so much Intelligence work himself and maintained personal
contact with his secret agents … Tegart’s agents always had implicit con-
fidence in him and he never betrayed it.” J. C. Curry, Tegart of the Indian
Police (Tunbridge Wells: The Courier Co., 1960), 24.
76. Cited in Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service
(London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 196.
Century Western Europe,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36: 4 (2010), 534.
78. C. A. Tegart, “Indian Communist Party,” 18 August 1922,
79. Tegart noted that Baidyanath Biswas, secretary of the Bengal Trade
Union Federation, had likely played a prominent part in one of the revo-
lutionaries’ greatest coups: the 1914 theft of Mauser pistols from a
Calcutta warehouse, while Sachin Sanyal was probably the leader of the
Benares branch of the “Bengal Revolutionary Association,” and Upen
Banarji had been convicted and sentenced to transportation for his role in
Manicktolla revolutionary conspiracy. Tegart to Wallinger, 17 November
1922, L/P&J/12/46, APAC BL.
80. See L/P&J/12/46 and L/P&J/12/47, APAC BL.
81. Paul Biggane, “Indian Revolutionaries,” L/P&J/12/117, APAC BL.
82. Paul Biggane to Malcolm Seton, IO, 13 December 1922, L/P&J/12/55,
APAC BL.
83. Note by J. W. Hose, IO, 21 December 1922; and Hose to Undersec. of
State, IO, 16 July 1923. L/P&J/12/55, APAC BL.
84. See L/P&J/12/55, and L/P&J/12/99, APAC BL.
85. Kate O’Malley observes that “Throughout his career at IPI Vickery, as an
Irishman, appears to have gotten great pleasure in locating precise and
up-to-date information about any Irish names and figures that appeared
on file from time to time. He often overwrote and corrected any misspell-
ings or inaccuracies relating to Ireland in other people’s reports, and he
always availed himself of the opportunity to show his true colors as a loyal
Irish servant to the Crown.” O’Malley, “IPI,” 182.
86. The report, dated 6 October 1921, is referenced in Tegart’s report on the
“Indian Communist Party,” 13 September 1922, but does not appear in
the file or in other IPI files concerning Indian communists from this
period. L/P&J/12/46, APAC BL.
87. C. A. Tegart, “Indian Communist Party,” 30 September 1922,
L/P&J/12/46, APAC BL. In January 1923, he reported that Roy was
conveying instructions to Bankim Banerji in Leeds via the Irish
Communist Bridget O’Harte [sic]. “The Indian Communist Party,” 29
January 1923, L/P&J/12/47, APAC BL.
226 M. SILVESTRI
88. C.A, Tegart, “Indian Communist Party,” 11 November 1922,

89. In Maia Ramnath’s words, “There was no hermetic seal between the
Bengalis and Punjabis, the students and laborers; between activities initi-
ated in California, or elsewhere in the Indian political network abroad;
between schemes underwritten only by subscription among the farmers,
or aided by German funds.” Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, 4.
90. The stories were circulated through another Bengali, Suren Karr. Ruth
Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 65 and 105.
91. According to Sumit Sarkar, the international wanderings of revolutionar-
ies helped to end the “intense Hindu religiosity,” “relative parochialism,”
and “rather limited social outlook of early militant nationalism.” Sumit
Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), 146.
92. History Sheet of Sailendra Nath Ghosh, 28 November 1929,
93. Joseph McQuade, “The New Asia of Rash Behari Bose: India, Japan and
the Limits of the International, 1912–1945,” Journal of World History
27: 4 (2016), 641–667.
94. Tapan K. Mukherjee, Taraknath Das: Life and Letters of a Revolutionary
in Exile (Calcutta: National Council of Education, Bengal, 1998).
95. History Sheet of Tarak Nath Das, 8 March 1923, L/P&J/12/166,
APAC BL.
96. C. J. Davidson, Consul, Tokyo, “Memorandum Regarding Japanese
Co-operation with Indian Revolutionary Agitators,” p. 3, 25 January
1923, L/P&J/12/157, APAC BL.
97. Yokota was former Director of the Bureau of Legislation during the Hara
Ministry, and a prominent member of Seiyukai Party. The British consul
speculated that he met Ghose at the request of Mitsuru Toyama, leader of
“a group of irresponsible and dangerous political fanatics known as the
Kokuryu Kai or Black dragon Society,” who had provided assistance to
Bose. C. J. Davidson, Consul, Tokyo, “Memorandum Regarding
Japanese Co-operation with Indian Revolutionary Agitators,” p. 3, 25
January 1923, L/P&J/12/157, APAC BL.
98. Copy of letter from Subhas Bose to S. N. Ghosh, Sec. of American Branch
of Indian National Congress, 7 November 1929, L/P&J/12/197,
APAC BL. Bose also forwarded Ghosh’s request for forty dollars to the
INC Executive, which prompted IPI to observe, “I suppose this letter is
genuine, but I cannot quite picture S. N. Ghosh asking the I.N.C. for
$40.” Note by IPI, 16 December 1929, L/P&J/12/197, APAC BL.
99. SIS Memo on “Shanghai. Sudhindra Bose,” 15 August 1921,

100. Manjapra, M. N. Roy, 4.
101. Leonard A. Gordon, “Portrait of a Bengal Revolutionary,” Journal of
Asian Studies 28: 2 (1968), 201–203.
102. Manjapra, M. N. Roy, 36–37.
103. Manjapra, M. N. Roy, 33.
104. Brückenhaus, “Origins of Trans-Imperial Policing,” 171–193.
105. See J. A. Wallinger, “Indian Communist Party,” November 1921,
L/P&J/12/46/9, APAC BL.
106. Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 60–91. See the example of Kanailal in
section one of this chapter.
107. J. A. Wallinger, “Indian Communist Party,” 25 July 1922, and IPI,
“Indian Communist Party,” 31 July 1922, L/P&J/12/46, APAC BL.
108. Charles Tegart, “Indian Communist Party,” 18 August 1922, and Tegart
to Wallinger, 17 November 1922, L/P&J/12/46, APAC BL.
109. “The Indian Communist Party,” 29 January 1923, L/P&J/12/47,
APAC BL.
110. Extract from Weekly Report of Director IB, GOI, 7 March 1923,
111. P. C. Bamford, “The Connection of Revolutionists in Bengal with
Bolsheviks,” p. 3, 23 August 1923, File No. 1907 of 1924, L/P&J/6/
1878, APAC BL.
Historical Journal 56:1 (2013), 232.
113. Information about Premranjan Sen Gupta, in “Statement of Persons
Arrested and Detained under (1) Regulation III of 1818, (2) Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, (3) Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act, 1925. Possible Releases.” [1926] Lytton Collection,
MSS Eur. F 160/37/159, APAC BL.
Bolsheviks,” p. 3, 23 August 1923, File No. 1907 of 1924,
115. See Michael Silvestri, “The Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita, and Dan
Breen: Terrorism in Bengal and Its Relation to the European Experience,”
Terrorism and Political Violence 21: 1 (2009), 1–27.
116. “Utho Jago,” Appendix III to “Activities of Revolutionaries in Bengal
from 1st September 1924 to 31st March 1925,” L/P&J/12/466, APAC
BL.
117. IPI also noted the tendency of nationalist newspapers, such as the Amrita
Bazar Patrika, to publish “pro-Bolshevik” articles with “insidious” con-
tent “dealing with the interests of labour and the necessity for organizing
228 M. SILVESTRI
the workers.” P. Biggane, “Summary. Indian Communists (21st

November 1922–10th May 1923),” 11 May 1923, L/P&J/12/47/208,
APAC BL. For colonial surveillance of early communists in Bengal, see
Suchetana Chattopadhyay, “The Bolshevik Menace: Colonial Surveillance
and the Origins of Socialist Politics in Calcutta,” South Asia Research 26:
165 (2006), 165–179 and “The Myth of the Outsider: From Whitehall
to Elysium Row, 1917–21,” Twentieth Century Communism 6: 6 (2014),
105–123.
118. The one “Bolshevik” was Hugo Espinoza, whose life will be discussed
below.
119. Information about Narayan Ch. Banarji, “Statement of Persons Arrested
and Detained under (1) Regulation III of 1818, (2) Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Ordinance, 1924, (3) Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Act, 1925. Possible Releases.” [1926] Lytton Collection, MSS Eur. F
160/37/101, APAC BL.
Bolsheviks,” iii-iv, 23 August 1923, File No. 1907 of 1924,
121. H. L. Stephenson, Officiating CS to GOB, to Sec. to GOI, Home, 17
December 1919, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 405 of 1919, WBSA.
122. R. Clarke, Commissioner Of Police, Calcutta, to CS to GOB, 26 February
1920, and H. L. Stephenson, Officiating CS to GOB, to Sec., Home,
GOI, 12 March 1920, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 87 of 1920, WBSA.
123. Jeffery, SIS, 172. For MI5, see Andrew, Defence of the Realm, 139–185.
124. The IPI archive on Roy contains eight files devoted to his activities from
1922–1937, as well as a copy of one of his publications. See the L/P&J/12
series, APAC BL.
125. C. A. Tegart, “The Indian Communist Party,” 3 February 1923,
126. Charles Tegart, “Indian Communist Party,” 23 August 1922,
127. Charles Tegart, “The Indian Communist Party,” 3 February 1923,
128. The system only came to the notice of the police when a “keenly anti-
British” lawyer named S. M. Sharma handed in a copy of a recent issue of
Vanguard and other publications to the police. Malayan Bulletin of
Political Intelligence, No. 18, 1 November 1923, L/P&J/12/103,
APAC BL.
129. Unless otherwise noted, information about Hugo Roschis/Hugo
Espinoza/Abdur Raschid is taken from the following: Extract from letter
from SP, Midnapore, 12 January 1928, File No. 462, L/P&J/6/1955,
APAC BL; and Census Return for Abdur Raschid and family, 1940; and
Draft Registration Card for Abdur Raschid, 1942. ancestryinstitution.

com. Accessed 18 September 2018.
130. Additional Deputy Sec. to GOB to Sec., Home GOI, 10 December
131. R. Sharp, Special Agent in Charge, New York Division, Department of
State, to R. C. Bannerman, Chief Special Agent, Washington, D.C., 3
February 1925. Reproduced in Prithwindra Mukherjee, Les origines intel-
lectuelles du movement d’indepéndence de l’Inde (1893–1918) (Paris:
Éditions Codex, 2010), np; M.I.5 Black List. Vol. XXI (Indian Volume),
(rev. ed. 1921), 67. L/P&J/12/667, APAC BL; and Richard Spence,
“Englishmen in New York: The SIS American Station, 1915–21,”
Intelligence and National Security 19: 3 (2004), 520.
132. M.I.5 Black List. Vol. XXI (Indian Volume) (rev. ed. 1921), 67,
L/P&J/12/667, APAC BL; and Spence, “Englishmen in New York,”
520.
133. GOI Home, “Conspiracy to Smuggle Arms into India via the Far East,”
in A. C. Bose, ed., Indian Revolutionaries Abroad: 1905–1927. Select
Documents (New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 2002), 373.
134. Espinoza to Roy, 12 October 1922, reproduced in Wallinger, “Indian
Communist Party,” 22 December 1922, IPI, L/P&J/12/46, APAC BL.
135. C. J. Davidson, Consul, Tokyo, “Memorandum Regarding Japanese
Co-operation with Indian Revolutionary Agitators,” 25 January 1923,
136. “Conspiracy to Smuggle Arms into India via the Far East,” in Bose, ed.,
Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 373.
137. Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence, No. 15, 11 June 1923,
L/P&J/12/103, APAC BL. The Akali Movement sought to gain con-
trol of Sikh gurdwaras or temples.
Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 373.
139. Additional Deputy Sec. to GOB to Sec., GOI Home, 10 December
Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 373–374.
141. Choy Loy had recently resided in Bow in London’s East End until he was
deported. IPI director J. A. Wallinger had “little doubt” that Loy was
responsible for the smuggling of arms on the SS Schlesien, and advised the
Intelligence Bureau that “Indian extremists who visit Hamburg are surely
aware of Choy’s activities and may use him as their agent in furtherance
of their own arms traffic.” Wallinger to David Petrie, Intelligence Bureau,
4 March 1925, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.
230 M. SILVESTRI
Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 375–376.
143. R. Sharp, Special Agent in Charge, New York Division, Department of
State, to R. C. Bannerman, Chief Special Agent, Washington, D.C., 3
February 1925. Reproduced in Mukherjee, Les origines intellectuelles.
144. Additional Deputy Sec. to GOB to Sec., Home GOI, 10 December
145. John Slight, The British Empire and the Hajj 1865–1956 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 242 and 245.
146. Sec. to Home GOI to CS to GOB, 4 January 1928, File No. 462,
147. Espinoza’s family was said to enjoy a “friendly relationship” with
Massachusetts Senator David I. Walsh, a committed anti-imperialist, so it
is possible that he intervened on his behalf. R. Sharp, Special Agent in
Charge, New York Division, Department of State, to R. C. Bannerman,
Chief Special Agent, Washington, D.C., 3 February 1925. Reproduced in
Mukherjee, Les origines intellectuelles.
148. Telegram, Viceroy to Sec. of State, 20 March 1928, File No. 462,
149. “Revised List of Indian Extremists in United States, Canada, Mexico and
Panama. Dated January 1931,” P&J No. 444 of 1928, L/P&J/6/1955.
The 1940 Census recorded that the former Hugo Espinoza lived in an
apartment at 2145 Southern Boulevard in the Bronx, New York, together
with his Hungarian-born wife Amina and his two sons Ameer (8) and
Anwar (7). The family had lived there for at least five years, and Raschid
worked as a shipping clerk for a tobacco wholesaler. He still held the posi-
tion two years later, although the Raschid family had moved to Prospect
Avenue in the Bronx. Raschid died in 1964.
150. Note by J. W. Hose, 24 May 1924; and note by IPI, nd [1929],
151. IPI to Sir John Ewart, GOI Home, 14 May 1936; and note by
W. Johnston, IO, 21 August 1936. In this instance the Secretary of State
for India Lord Zetland, a former Governor of Bengal, objected to Ghose’s
return, but was willing to accede to the requests of the GOB and
GOI. Note by Lord Zetland, Sec. of State, 30 August 1936,
152. DIG, IB, Review of Revolutionary Matters for the Week Ending 2nd March
1939, L/P&J/12/401, APAC BL.
Struggle against Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2011), 84. When Bose returned from his two European journeys he was
immediately placed under house arrest in 1934 and imprisoned in 1936.
154. Viceroy to Sec. of State, 24 December 1932; and Viceroy to Sec. of State,

13 December 1932, L/P&J/12/214, APAC BL.
155. Viceroy to Sec. of State, 24 December 1932, L/P&J/12/214, APAC BL.
156. Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent, 86 and 87–88.
157. See Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, 90–117.
158. Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent, 92.
159. IPI, “Subhas Chandra Bose,” 19 October 1933, L/P&J/12/214, APAC
BL.
160. A memo from the British Legation in Prague forwarded to the India
Office in 1936 refers to arrangements being “made for the supply of
weapons needed by terrorists from or via Ireland.” “Anti-British Activities
in India”: from Legation in Prague. Forwarded by Foreign Office, 25
May 1936, L/P&J/12/216, APAC BL.
161. Although Bose’s response to Mussolini in the 1930s was ambivalent, ulti-
mately his “single-minded absorption in the cause of India’s indepen-
dence” allowed him to ignore the atrocities of the Axis Powers. Bose, His
Majesty’s Opponent, 11, 94 and 203.
162. The Bengali Communist revolutionary M. N. Roy referred to Bose as
“the Bengal Communist” in an intercepted letter from September 1922;
IPI noted that both Evelyn and M. N. Roy had established a connection
with Bose, whose activities were “frequently mentioned” in notes. In the
following year, Bengal Police IB officer P. C. Bamford described both
Bose and C. R. Das as “impressed” with communist ideas. Tegart to
Wallinger, 17 November 1922, and “Indian Communist Party,” 23
November 1922, IPI, L/P&J/12/46, APAC BL; and P. C. Bamford,
“The Connection of Revolutionists in Bengal with Bolsheviks,” 23
August 1923, File No. 1907 of 1924, L/P&J/6/1878, APAC BL.
163. IPI, “Subhas Bose and His Associates” 20 September 1933; and IPI,
“Recent Activities of Subhas Chandra Bose,” 20 July 1933,
L/P&J/12/214 APAC BL. For the attraction of fascist ideals in India,
particularly the idea of the Volk, see Benjamin Zachariah, “At the Fuzzy
Edge of Fascism: Framing the Volk in India,” South Asia 38: 4 (2015),
639–655.
164. IPI to Peel, IO, 18 October 1934, L/P&J/12/214, APAC BL.
165. IPI particularly objected to a passage in which Bose described the killings
of three successive district magistrates in Midnapore District as the result
of “untold atrocities committed by the forces of the Crown in Midnapore.”
IPI to Peel, IO, 18 October 1934, L/P&J/12/214, APAC BL.
166. Telegram from GOI to IO, 11 January 1935, L/P&J/12/215, APAC
BL.
167. W. Johnstone to R. J. Peel, 17 January 1935; Note by Peel, 17 January
1935; and R. J. Peel to Wishart & Co., London, 5 February 1935,
CHAPTER 6
Spies, Sailors, and Revolutionaries: Bengal

Revolutionaries, Indian Political Intelligence,
and International Arms Smuggling
While Bengali revolutionaries never succeeded in their objective of a

broad-based, armed revolt against the British Raj, by the early 1930s, they
had achieved considerable success in targeting and assassinating senior
colonial officials. The revolutionaries assassinated the Inspector General of
the Bengal Police in 1930 and, in the next two years, three successive
District Magistrates in the western Bengal district of Midnapore, a center
of nationalist politics. Among a dozen murders and attempted murders in
1931 were attempts on the lives of Edward Villiers, President of the
European Association in Calcutta, and Indian Civil Service officer R. R.
Garlick, a judge in a district near Calcutta, who had handed down a death
sentence to Dinesh Chandra Gupta, who had assassinated the Inspector
General of Jails inside the Writers’ Building in 1930. Villiers narrowly
escaped from an assassin when he was attacked in his office, but Garlick
was not so fortunate. While presiding in court, he was shot in the head by
a young revolutionary named Kanai Lal Bhattacharji, who after being shot
and wounded by a police sergeant committed suicide by swallow-
ing cyanide.1
Among several attempts on the lives of the Governors of Bengal in this
period was an effort to assassinate Sir Stanley Jackson by Bina Das, one of
a new generation of radical and committed female revolutionaries.2 Das
had planned to shoot Jackson when he handed her degree to her at the
convocation ceremonies of Calcutta University on 6 February 1932.
Security arrangements for the Governor, however, complicated her efforts.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_6
234 M. SILVESTRI
Degrees were distributed to students before the beginning of the cere-

mony rather than being handed out individually on stage. Altering her
plan, Das left her seat in the Senate Hall where the ceremonies were being
held and fired three shots at Jackson, all of which missed. Jackson was
nonetheless shaken by Das’ determination to carry out the assassination
and afterward wrote to Secretary of State for India Sir Samuel Hoare that
“she knew how to handle that thing.”3
The assassination of Garlick and the attempts on the lives of Villiers and
Jackson are linked, not only because they reflected tactics typical of the
Bengal revolutionary movement but also because of the weapons involved.
All three revolutionaries used revolvers imported from the same location:
the Belgian port of Antwerp. An intelligence report from 1932 listed four-
teen recent cases of arms smuggling and recovery involving weapons from
Belgium, ten of which were in Bengal.4 From the perspective of colonial
authorities, staunching the flow of weapons was the key to stopping the
revolutionary movement. As the Director of the Intelligence Bureau
observed, “Arms are the crux of the terrorist situation in Bengal, and the
constant endeavour of the police of that province is to prevent terrorists
from acquiring such arms through smugglers, and to recover such arms as
they have already obtained.”5
This chapter will explore the arms-smuggling efforts of Bengali revolu-
tionaries in the 1920s and 1930s and the efforts of the colonial state to
prevent them. The previous chapter explored how the Bengali revolution-
ary movement, while regionally focused, also had substantial global
dimensions; although rooted in the political and social context of colonial
India, it was also very much a transnational movement. The involvement
of revolutionaries with the clandestine arms trade illustrates another facet
of the movement’s global dimensions. Bengali revolutionaries could be
found not only in Bengal and elsewhere in India in the interwar period,
but in Europe, Asia, and North America. They forged alliances with Irish-
American nationalists in the United States and communist revolutionaries
in Europe. In neighboring Burma, they “used imperial networks to expand
their influence,” capitalizing on their status as high-caste Hindus to find
employment and form alliances with Bengalis in imperial service, thus
“inserting themselves into the fragile nexus that linked British power and
indigenous elites.”6
Bengali revolutionaries also sought to make use of another prominent
imperial network: that of Indian seamen or lascars who provided a signifi-
cant portion of the manpower for British shipping in the late nineteenth
6 SPIES, SAILORS, AND REVOLUTIONARIES: BENGAL REVOLUTIONARIES… 235
and early twentieth centuries. Lascars’ “global reach and the porousness of
the ports they visited” posed major problems for imperial authorities and
necessitated strenuous efforts by British imperial intelligence agencies to
prevent the movement of arms to revolutionaries.7 If the story of imperial
intelligence in the previous chapter featured many successes in the moni-
toring of elite revolutionaries and the thwarting of their plans, the world
of lascars proved more difficult to penetrate. The coordination of efforts
among different intelligence agencies led to additional tensions, particu-
larly between officers based in Bengal and those elsewhere both within
and outside India.
1 Imperial Networks and the Clandestine Arms

Trade
Historians have recently explored the transnational nature of the British
Empire, both in terms of the impact of empire on metropolitan British
culture and in the interconnections between the colonies of the empire. In
the words of Tony Ballantyne, rather than conceiving of empire as “a
spoked wheel with London as the ‘hub,’ where the various spokes … from
the periphery meet,” historians should rather understand empire as “a
complex web consisting of ‘horizontal’ filaments that run among various
colonies in addition to ‘vertical’ connections between the metropole and
individual colonies.”8 Ballantyne’s formulation of the British Empire
shows how it was possible for imperial networks to bypass the metropole
and connect individual colonies.9 In the same fashion, the movement of
peoples around the British Empire was not a linear process of outward
migration and return to origin, but rather an “ensemble of crisscrossing
circulatory flows.”10 Indian sailors or lascars, one of the primary groups
upon whom Bengali revolutionaries relied to obtain arms and ammuni-
tion, constituted a truly global workforce who, as Gopalan Balachandran
has noted, participated in multiple “intersecting networks of circulation”
that brought them from rural India to Europe, East Asia, and the
Americas.11
Yet while the concept of imperial networks illustrates many facets of the
experiences of and connections among the diverse peoples of the British
Empire, it does not adequately explain all transnational facets of the
empire world.12 An acknowledgment of the unequal economic and politi-
cal power of the empire’s constituent parts is also necessary to understanding
236 M. SILVESTRI
the interconnections of empire. The transnational arms-smuggling efforts

of Bengali revolutionaries illustrate this imbalance, as clandestine networks
of revolutionaries and maritime workers were opposed not only by agents
and officers of imperial intelligence agencies but also by European govern-
ment authorities and shipping companies.
Coordinating these imperial intelligence efforts was the small Indian
Political Intelligence (IPI) office in London. In assessing the threat posed
by Indian nationalism, IPI, as we have seen, tended to prioritize the threat
posed by communism over radical nationalism. Yet IPI also exhibited con-
cern about potential alliances between communists and nationalist
revolutionaries.
More than two dozen files in the IPI archive in the British Library deal
with the clandestine arms trade from the early 1920s to the late 1930s,
while numerous others discuss issues related to arms smuggling. Britain
remained the largest world exporter of arms in the interwar period, yet it
struggled to control arms smuggling in areas such as the Middle East
and India.13
As we have already seen, the revolutionary groups in Bengal were not
only resilient and adaptable, but over time expanded the scope of their
anticolonial actions.14 Yet their plans were for naught if the revolutionaries
could not obtain the arms necessary to put these inspirational ideas into
practice. Within colonial India, arms were exceedingly difficult to obtain
after the Rebellion of 1857, as a series of Arms Acts, beginning in 1878,
strictly regulated the manufacture, sale, and possession of weapons rang-
ing from swords to cannons.15 One early response of the Bengali revolu-
tionaries was to construct homemade bombs. The revolutionary
Hemchandra Das traveled to Paris in 1906, where he met with Russian
anarchists and revolutionaries and returned to Bengal with a bomb-making
manual whose contents were widely disseminated throughout the prov-
ince. Revolutionaries became proficient in making bombs out of picric
acid and items such as cocoa tins and brass bed-post knobs. Bombs fea-
tured in many of the first attacks carried out by the revolutionaries, per-
haps most notably in 1912, when one thrown by a Bengali revolutionary
injured the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, while he was making a cer-
emonial entry into Delhi on an elephant. The bomb became associated
with the “Bengali terrorist” to such a degree that the colonial stereotype
depicted him as holding, in Sumit Sarkar’s memorable phrase, “a bomb in
one hand and the Gita in the other.”16
While bombs remained a staple of their arsenal throughout the interwar

period, Bengali revolutionaries also sought to obtain firearms.17 On the
Northwest Frontier of India, the rifle was the weapon of choice for Pathan
lashkars who carried out guerilla campaigns against British and Indian
troops. It was the revolver, however, that became the weapon of choice for
Bengali revolutionaries.18 As was the case with rifles among the Pathans,
revolvers became invested with not only practical but symbolic impor-
tance.19 An intelligence officer commented during the First World War
that “the possession of revolvers and guns was a sort of elementary symbol
of membership to the revolutionary societies.”20 The revolutionaries had a
major success in obtaining these weapons at the beginning of the war,
when a sympathetic Indian clerk aided the theft of 50 Mauser pistols and
46,000 rounds of ammunition from Rodda & Co., an arms merchant in
Calcutta. The 1918 Sedition Committee report called the theft “an event
of the greatest importance in the history of revolutionary crime in Bengal.”
Almost all of the pistols were immediately distributed to nine different
revolutionary groups in Bengal, and fifty-four cases of murder, attempted
murder, dacoity, and attempted dacoity were attributed to them over the
next four years. The Sedition Committee observed, “It may indeed safely
be said that few, if any, revolutionary outrages have taken place in Bengal
since August 1914, in which Mauser pistols stolen from Rodda & Co.
have not been used.”21
Fears of another arms acquisition on the scale of the Rodda arms theft
haunted colonial authorities in Bengal throughout the interwar era. A
decade later, the Government of Bengal outlined a nightmare scenario,
with dire consequences for the British Empire in India if the revolutionar-
ies were able to import a substantial arms shipment:
When he remembers the loss of life which occurred as the result of the theft
of 50 Mauser pistols from Messrs. Rodda & Co. in 1914 and the difficulty
that was experienced in recovering them, the Governor in Council is
appalled at the probable consequences of the importation of hundreds of
automatic pistols and thousands of rounds of ammunition. If only one con-
signment were to reach Bengal, it would produce a situation with which
Government were powerless to deal even by martial law … the morale both
of the police and of the public will be shattered, and the officers who could
deal with the situation will have been the first to be removed. If such a situ-
ation arose, the effects would not be confined to Bengal; arms and ammuni-
tion would be distributed to disaffected persons in other provinces who
would be quick to follow the example of Bengal.22
238 M. SILVESTRI
The revolutionaries were not able to carry out another coup like the
Rodda arms theft, however. Instead, their primary focus after the First
World War shifted to efforts to obtain weapons from outside India. In
1934, the Government of Bengal estimated that eighty percent of the
arms used by revolutionaries came from outside India.23 One important
channel for obtaining weapons was through networks of Indian revolu-
tionaries overseas and other sympathetic revolutionary movements. By the
time of the First World War, Indian revolutionaries had formed anti-
imperial networks in Europe, North America, and Southeast and East
Asia, and there were efforts to exploit these links in order to funnel arms
to revolutionaries in India. The largest-scale effort, and perhaps the best
known, was the attempt made by the revolutionary Ghadar Party on the
west coast of the United States to arrange large-scale arms shipments from
the German government.24 Given the threat that the Bengal revolutionar-
ies posed with only fifty stolen pistols, it is easy to see why the prospect of
the estimated 30,000 revolvers and rifles that Germany attempted to
import to India in 1915 represented a terrifying prospect to British colo-
nial authorities.25
In the immediate postwar years, Indian revolutionaries attempted to
exploit the arms-smuggling networks of Irish republicans, who imported
large quantities of weapons during the Anglo-Irish War. There is evidence
that Irish and Irish-American seamen with republican sympathies were
involved with the smuggling of weapons for Indian revolutionaries.
According to the historian and activist C. Desmond Greaves, these seamen
formed “the safest line of communication between the national movement
in India and the Indian exiles throughout the world.”26 British consular
and intelligence authorities shared suspicions of Irish assistance to the
Indian arms-smuggling network, particularly among Irish republicans in
New York.27 In 1922, British intelligence agents obtained information
linking the Bengali revolutionary Taraknath Das with the arms dealer
George Gordon Rorke, who had been arrested for smuggling submachine
guns to Ireland.28 Yet while Irish nationalists in the United States provided
both institutional support and ideological inspiration for Indian revolu-
tionaries, the results of their arms-smuggling efforts were disappointing.
In May 1922, the Political Intelligence Bureau of the Singapore Police
reported that the efforts of the New York-based Friends of Freedom for
India (FFI) to import arms to equip a “Republican Army” in India were
“languishing.” They attributed this failure in large part to the lack of
cooperation from Irish republicans. “It seems that American Sinn Feiners,
though ready to give their moral support have not yet committed them-
selves to the extent of allowing the Indians to utilise their highly devel-
oped arms-smuggling organization.”29
Bengali revolutionaries also attempted to smuggle arms using networks
of Indian revolutionaries in Europe. In the early 1920s, one of the princi-
pal figures involved in this enterprise was the former Jugantar member and
founder of the Indian Communist Party M. N. Roy. In spite of his rejec-
tion of their methods, Roy continued to command the respect of Bengali
revolutionaries.30 While in Berlin, Roy associated with the Irish socialist
republican Roddy Connolly, the son of James Connolly, who had been
executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising. Arms smuggling became
an important area of collaboration for these two revolutionaries. Roy may
have put Connolly in touch with an Indian merchant and sometime arms
dealer named Henry Obed, whose involvement in smuggling will be dis-
cussed below. In September 1922, Irish republicans “were reported to be
buying arms in Hamburg from a firm which was willing to do business
with Indians.”31 These efforts did yield some successes for Indian as well
as Irish revolutionaries. The Bengal Police Intelligence Branch (IB)
reported that in the winter of 1922–1923 a “considerable number” of
firearms, in particular automatic pistols, of German manufacture, had
been obtained by the revolutionaries and deployed in several of their
actions. These weapons were not produced in India, and the IB concluded
that they must have been smuggled into the country.32 Paul Biggane of
IPI concluded that “it is impossible to overstate the danger of Roy’s
arrangements for smuggling. The channels are apparently to be tried first
with Communist literature and arms are to be sent when the time is ripe.”
Invoking once again the 1914 Rodda arms theft, Biggane went on to
observe that “as regards India itself it need only be said that a few years
ago the Bengal revolutionaries showed the harm they could do with 50
stolen revolvers and 50 thousand rounds, and that Roy, whose aim is revo-
lution and who does not believe that non-violent revolution is possible, is
now doing his best to enlist these revolutionaries under his banner.”33
Yet in spite of the efforts of expatriate revolutionaries such as Roy, the
Bengali revolutionaries ultimately obtained far more arms from small-scale
individual transactions than from large-scale revolutionary conspiracy.
Much of the activity of this clandestine arms trade consisted of single
weapons or small numbers of arms secreted aboard ships, often by indi-
vidual sailors. This does not mean, however, that such smuggling was
insignificant, either from the point of view of colonial authorities or from
240 M. SILVESTRI
that of Indian revolutionaries. An instructive parallel is provided by the

Irish republican movement during the Anglo-Irish War. In spite of the
much greater financial resources available to Irish republicans, the strength
of Irish-American political power in the northeastern United States, and
the much shorter distances necessary to smuggle arms from Europe or
North America to Ireland, large-scale republican arms-smuggling efforts
following the Great War almost invariably ended in failure.34 In contrast,
successful Irish Republican Army (IRA) smuggling was by and large the
result of well-established networks of Irish republican sympathizers, who
provided “a small but steady trickle of weapons from the black markets of
England and Europe, and from the gun shops of America.” This small-
scale arms trade of a handful of weapons at a time, aided by Irish sailors
and Irish dockworkers, yielded impressive results in the aggregate. Peter
Hart estimates that in the two years leading up to the Anglo-Irish truce,
289 handguns, 53 rifles, over 24,000 rounds of ammunition, and more
than 1000 pounds of explosives were successfully smuggled through
Liverpool alone into Ireland.35 The weapons imported were also suited to
the type of campaign carried out by the IRA, in which—in contrast to
popular mythology—assassinations played a more prominent role than
ambushes of police and military forces by republican flying columns. As
Hart observes, shotguns killed more crown forces than submachine guns,
and rifles were generally less important than pistols and revolvers:
“‘Executions’—assassinations and murder—were much more common
than battles, and death was more likely to come at point-blank range, on
doorsteps and in ditches, than in a firefight.”36
Hart’s description of the IRA’s campaign applies equally well to the
Bengali revolutionaries’ efforts against the British Raj, which also focused
on assassinations of colonial officials. As in the case of the IRA, the arms-
smuggling efforts of Bengali revolutionaries that succeeded were small-
scale ones rather than large shipments, and the cumulative amount of arms
could be impressive. In 1924, for example, 476 weapons (including thirty-
four revolvers, 319 automatic pistols, fifteen pistols, and one hundred
sporting rifles) were seized by Indian and Ceylonese customs officials. The
statistics led IPI chief John Wallinger to observe, “All these cases show
that smuggling occurs only in very small quantities; the totals, however …
are pretty substantial and give cause for a certain amount of alarm.”37
The seriousness with which colonial authorities took the individual
smuggling of revolvers was illustrated in 1930, when a Belgian sailor
named Jean Hellebaut was arrested in Singapore for attempting to sell a
revolver to an Indian man at the docks at Tanjong Pagar. The Indian

turned out to be a police detective, and Hellebaut was arrested; a total of
three automatic pistols and 221 rounds of ammunition were found on his
person and in his cabin on the ship. The judge, referencing an incident
four years earlier when a Chinese resident of Singapore purchased a
revolver from a German sailor, sentenced the Belgian to two years’ impris-
onment and commented, “I have got to go the limit in regard to sentence
and this sort of thing must be stopped.”38 The case attracted a significant
amount of publicity, as Hellebaut turned out to be the son of a prominent
Belgian general. The Governor of the Straits Settlements commuted his
sentence to banishment and had him returned to Antwerp; he emphasized
that this decision was not because of diplomatic intervention, but because
of concerns about the unsuitability of Singapore Prison for European pris-
oners. Yet the governor added
that there were no extenuating circumstances in this case. The continual

cases of sale of arms to Asiatics by Aliens who bring them from Europe and
elsewhere is causing serious anxiety to the Police and may certainly be said
to be an aggravating circumstance in this case; and it will be appreciated that
such offenses merit drastic action in view of the prevalence of shooting
crimes, gang-robberies, and murders in this country.39
The determination to prosecute a member of a socially prominent

European family demonstrates the degree to which British colonies in Asia
had by this time become significant sources of arms for Indian
revolutionaries.
2 Sailor and Smugglers

As Hellebaut’s example shows, not all of the illicit arms trade was carried
out by Indians; revolutionary attempts to obtain arms involved individuals
of differing nationalities and with differing motivations. In January 1925,
a long-standing member of the Dacca Anushilan Samiti named Dhirendra
Prosad Ray attempted to negotiate an arms purchase through a Sikh
named Bhola Singh, a Peshawari named Syed Golam, a Eurasian man
named Robinson, and three Chinese men named Ah Yeong, Ah Loo, and
Ah Yeun. Ray had already purchased several revolvers and was negotiating
to purchase eight automatic pistols and 800 rounds of ammunition, which
had apparently been smuggled into India by a Chinese carpenter on the
242 M. SILVESTRI
S.S. Padua.40 The Sikh and the Peshawari acted as intermediaries between
the Bengalis and the Anglo-Indian and the Chinese men; the three Chinese
individuals, along with Ray and another member of the Samiti, were fined
and sentenced under the Arms Act.41
From the beginning of the revolutionary movement in Bengal, police
raised concerns about the possibility of European sailors serving as a con-
duit for large arms shipments. A member of the Eastern Bengal and Assam
government reported in 1908 that two sources had confirmed “systematic
gun-running at Chittagong by the German steamers.”42 In 1913, one
Percival Thorpe was arrested at the Calcutta shop of Lyon and Lyon while
purchasing a Mauser pistol under an assumed name. In his confession, he
implicated two other Europeans named Wyndham and Kelly. Kelly was
acquitted, but Thorpe and Wyndham were convicted and their privilege,
granted to all Europeans in India, of exemption from the Arms Act was
also withdrawn. Even so, the Inspector General pressed for stronger mea-
sures to control European arms ownership, arguing that “the registration
of ownership of all pistols and revolvers should be enforced.”43 By the
early 1920s, European sailors clearly were aware that there was an active
market for smuggled weapons in Calcutta. In 1922, the CID of the Burma
Police decided to place an agent on board the German ship S.S. Sturmfels
after reports were received that a German sailor named Shumacher, who
had sailed to Rangoon on the same vessel earlier that year, had offered to
sell seven revolvers. The German seaman also reported that he was part of
a gang that had sold 230 revolvers in Karachi, and which planned to bring
out a “big quantity” on their next voyage.44 As colonial authorities became
more aware of the threat posed by arms smuggling by sailors, at least some
European seamen decided that the risks outweighed the potential benefits.
At the end of 1924, an Indian crew member of a German ship told the
Intelligence Bureau that he had “heard from the German crews that they
used to bring some revolvers on board the steamer for selling to Indians
but on account of the arrest of some of their men, they became very
careful.”45
Nonetheless, arms smuggling by European sailors continued for years
afterward. In 1927, three Norwegian sailors of the S.S. Rinda were
arrested for attempting to sell arms and ammunition four days after their
ship docked in Calcutta. Two of the men were arrested with a revolver “in
perfect working order” and twenty-two live cartridges several miles away
from where their ship lay at anchor on the Hooghly. The sailors admitted
that they were attempting to sell the weapon and ammunition, but
onetheless mounted a vigorous protest of their arrest that drew the sym-
n
pathy of the Norwegian consul in Calcutta. According to the Norwegian
legation in London, the men had been deceived by an agent provocateur
of the Calcutta Police, “a detective, disguised as an ordinary ‘cooli,’” [sic]
who promised to “buy weapons at fabulous prices.” Such deceptive prac-
tices, the ship’s captain stated, were common practices among the police,
who he argued encouraged sailors to bring in arms, “explaining to them
that they do not run much risk and even urging them on the next trip to
India to bring revolvers with them.”46 The Government of Bengal denied
these allegations, observing that the sailors had disregarded a printed
notice in their cabin that all weapons had to be declared to customs offi-
cials in Calcutta upon arrival. The circumstances in which the sailors were
arrested, as well, pointed to their knowledge that they were engaging in an
illegal act: at the time of their arrest, the revolver was concealed within one
sailor’s sock, while the cartridges were wrapped in a handkerchief con-
cealed under the second sailor’s shirt. A third sailor, who was said to be the
owner of the revolver and who had engaged the other two to sell it in
return for a twenty-five percent commission, was released for lack of evi-
dence. The other two were convicted and fined Rs. 300 each in lieu of
four months’ imprisonment.47
European seamen thus continued to see arms smuggling in Asia as a
consistently profitable, albeit risky, venture, well into the 1930s. On 28
February 1934, the Secretary of State for India telegraphed the Viceroy
on behalf of IPI to notify the Intelligence Bureau that three cases of
Mauser revolvers were being transported on the Hansa Line vessel S.S.
Rotenfels departing from Antwerp. The weapons were “possibly intended
for Far East,” but the ship was due to call at Colombo, Cocananda,
Madras, and Calcutta. Posing as “bogus purchasers,” customs officials
boarded the ship while it was docked at Calcutta. They negotiated with
two German sailors named Kurt Krug and Frederick Warneke, a cook’s
mate and a baker, who agreed to sell six Belgian-made revolvers for
Rs. 300. When the true identity of the “purchasers” became clear, Warneke
threw five of the revolvers through the porthole into the water. The weap-
ons were recovered later that day, and the two German sailors were put on
trial for illegal possession and sales of the revolvers and ammunition.48
Both were found guilty in a jury trial and sentenced to three years’ impris-
onment. The judge admonished them for their attempt at smuggling,
emphasizing that “anything which facilitates the commission of terrorism
is a very serious offense.”49
244 M. SILVESTRI
By this time, Chinese sailors had also emerged as an important source

of arms for Indian revolutionaries.50 By the 1930s, the Calcutta Police
regarded Chinese seamen as one of the largest suppliers of weapons to
revolutionary groups, and speculated that groups of sailors, and some-
times entire crews, would share the economic risk by taking out subscrip-
tions to purchase revolvers and ammunition. Police were also frustrated by
the caution of Chinese crew members, who preferred almost exclusively to
deal with members of Calcutta’s Chinese community, rather than Indians,
as intermediaries.51 The Chinese community was thus strongly identified
with smuggling in British India, and it was certainly the case that some
Chinese, particularly unskilled migrants who arrived in large numbers due
to the political upheavals of early-twentieth-century China, amassed
wealth, particularly involving the smuggling of opium out of Calcutta.52
The Dane August Peter Hansen, who served with the Port Police of
Calcutta, regarded Chinese as “the most efficient experts in the game” of
smuggling.53 Some intended buyers of arms in Calcutta were Bengali rev-
olutionaries. The Deputy Commissioner of the Calcutta Police B. N.
Banarji observed that “the Chinamen preferred selling these weapons to
terrorists (Swadeshi Baboos) as their experience in previous cases showed
that this type of purchaser paid the best price for firearms.”54
3 Lascars: Amir Khan and Henry Obed

While European and East Asian seamen thus constituted an important
source for the clandestine importation of weapons, the primary conduit
for arms smuggling to India were the Indian seamen known as lascars.
Indian sailors had been recruited for service on British ships since the
eighteenth century, but the numbers increased from the 1880s through
the Second World War, when British steamships dominated the world’s
merchant fleet. Lascars were employed as stewards and deckhands and as
firemen and trimmers in the ships’ engine rooms. By 1937, lascars formed
more than a quarter of the 142,000 men working on British ships, a total
that does not include the substantial number working in the merchant
fleets of other nations.55
The lives of these lascars provide an important lens through which his-
torians have examined the politics of race and nationality in twentieth-
century Britain.56 Much early scholarship on lascars emphasized their
subordination and oppression in what were undoubtedly harsh working
conditions in which they earned only one-third to one-fifth of the wages
of their British counterparts. Laura Tabili notes how the contracts signed
by lascars, with their low pay rates, unfavorable conditions of service, and
exemption from the protections enjoyed by unionized British seamen,
reproduced “the racial division of labor and inequalities of well-being
between Black and white people in the British Empire” aboard British
ships.57 More recent scholars, however, have argued against a “victimo-
logical reading” in which lascars are “uniformly represented as hapless
victims of a particularly unequal colonial encounter.”58 Rather, they
emphasize their diversity of life experiences, the opportunities that the
mobility of their profession allowed, and their sense of agency. The very
concept of the “lascar,” Ali Raza and Benjamin Zachariah have recently
noted, was itself a colonial construct, and they argue that we should not
unquestioningly accept the validity of colonial assumptions about lascars’
political passivity.59 Jonathan Hyslop has similarly noted how some Asian
and African seamen displayed an outlook that “was not cosmopolitan in a
strict sense, but it was worldly, contemporary, and to a significant extent
open to encounters across social boundaries.”60
In particular, we should not assume that lascars consistently shunned
the world of anticolonial politics; rather, as Raza and Zachariah argue,
“the lascar network … was ripe with possibilities for engaging with radical
politics.”61 M. N. Roy envisioned lascars as a potential nexus for the spread
of communist beliefs among revolutionary groups in Bengal. According
to an intelligence report from 1922, Roy hoped to initiate a plan whereby
“every ship on the Indian lines is provided with at least one lascar who is
a genuine Communist and ready to act as such.”62 Even when British
authorities did not consider lascars to be conscious revolutionaries, they
saw the mobility intrinsic to their profession—particularly when utilized in
conjunction with global networks of anticolonial activists—as a potent
threat to the Empire.63 Colonial authorities in Calcutta in the 1920s har-
bored suspicions that the constant and casual flow of European visitors to
the city, particularly those with “Semitic features,” included many agents
of international communism. In turn, they feared how these “Jewish
Bolshevik” agents might utilize networks of Bengali lascars in Calcutta to
spread communism. As Suchetana Chattopadhyay argues, “The geo-
graphically mobile nature ascribed to the Bengali Muslim seamen along-
side pan-Islamists and Jewish travelers further bolstered the image of the
itinerant ‘Bolshevik Agent’ in official perceptions.”64
Many lascars saw arms smuggling primarily as a profit-making venture.
Some, however, actively sympathized with the anticolonial aims of the
246 M. SILVESTRI
revolutionaries, and a few became committed nationalists.65 The anticolo-

nial activities of lascars proved difficult for both British intelligence officers
and elite nationalists to control. As Vivek Bald observes, “There was an
independent realm of nationalist activity among Indian seamen in
New York and other ports in the 1910s and 1920s—a realm that was con-
nected to that of the ‘educated’ radicals … but which had its own distinct
spaces, circulations, interactions, and vernacular, to which these elite men
had little access.”66 Lascar networks in the United States in the early twen-
tieth century enabled Indian sailors to evade restrictions on immigration
and naturalization and forge lives in communities ranging from the ports
of New York and Baltimore to cities such as Detroit in the upper Midwest.67
Some of these seamen displayed a commitment to Indian nationalism,
which extended beyond simply an opportunity for profit from illegally
transporting arms.
Dada Amir Haider Khan, one of the few lascars to have left a detailed
memoir of his experiences, became involved with Indian revolutionary
organizations in New York City following the First World War. Khan, who
later became a communist activist, credited the development of his politi-
cal awareness to discussions he had as an eighteen-year-old with an Irish-
American sailor named Joseph Mulkane. Although Mulkane was sixteen
years older than Khan, he recalled that the Irish-American “treated me as
an equal in every respect”:
Being the son of an Irish revolutionary, Joe knew all about the sins and mis-
deeds which the British had perpetrated on Ireland, including the way they
pitted one portion of the Irish people against the other, in accordance with
the British policy of ‘divide and rule.’ He would frequently relate to me the
various tactics by which a small country like England was able to dominate
so many races and nationalities in different parts of the world…. It was
through Joe that my first anti-British, pro-Indian sentiment began to grow.68
Khan’s political discussions with Mulkane were far from unusual within
the context of Indian nationalism. During the early 1920s, an important
nexus for lascar participation in nationalist politics was established in
New York, where, as discussed in the previous chapter, the Friends of
Freedom for India was established by the expatriate Bengali revolutionary
Sailendranath Ghose. The FFI made common cause with American liberal
and radical organizations and with Irish-American nationalists in particu-
lar.69 As was the case with other nationalist organizations within the Indian
diaspora, the FFI counted both elite and working-class Indians among its
members. It devoted attention to issues directly affecting lascars, such as
the deportation of Indians from the United States and labor conditions on
British ships.70
Khan was brought into the sphere of the FFI through his friendship
with a man he identified as only the “Gadar Sikh,” a forty-year-old Punjabi
man who had been sent to New York from California as a representative of
the Ghadar Party. Khan recalled that he spent “all of his free time” in the
company of the Sikh, who “would often narrate stories of the struggles
that were going on in various British colonies, particularly Ireland and
Egypt” and read aloud stories from the revolutionary publication Gadar
ki Ganj.71 As well as finding a “ready listener” in Khan, the Sikh intro-
duced him to the leadership of the FFI, including the Bengalis Sailendranath
Ghose, Basanta Kumar Roy, and Taraknath Das, as well as the American
radical Agnes Smedley, whose “dynamic energy and magnetic personality”
the young Khan saw as central to the organization.72 Khan observed the
propaganda and fund-raising operations of the FFI, and attended public
lectures on Gandhi as well as the first congress of the FFI in November
1920. In hindsight, Khan considered that the “various forms of anti-
British politics and pro-Indian agitation” he witnessed in New York were
“very significant” to his political development. He was aware that he was
far from alone in this, noting that former lascars who had deserted from
ships and were making a living as unskilled laborers in New York City,
shared his growing interest in Indian nationalism. “Under normal circum-
stances,” Khan wrote, “they would have had no interest in politics, yet
now these humble sons of India were living in anticipation and hope of
momentous changes … a glorious, united Indian nation.”73
Unlike many of these men, Khan returned to a maritime career, but
combined his life as a lascar with his newfound zeal for the nationalist
cause. He wrote that he “had a strong desire to enlighten my countrymen
and felt that every Indian would join the struggle provided he or she could
be convinced of its justness.” Khan spoke to the Indian crews of ships
while in port in New York and Boston; in addition, the Bengali revolu-
tionaries of the FFI and his friend the “Gadar Sikh” hoped to use him as a
conduit for smuggling literature and arms as well. Taraknath Das gave
Khan “some anti-British books and pamphlets in English” produced by
the FFI, as well as a photograph of the delegates to the FFI Congress,
which he pinned above his berth on board ship. The “Gadar Sikh” gave
him not only copies of Ghadar publications, but also two thirty-two caliber
248 M. SILVESTRI
Colt automatic pistols, with instructions to make best use of them and to
pass them on to an Indian “who you believe is worthy of them.” Khan
assumed that somewhere in the course of his voyage, another Sikh living
overseas would provide instructions on what to do with the weapons.74
Khan, like other lascars, was thus not simply a passive consumer of revo-
lutionary ideology. In spite of his belief that his political knowledge was
deficient compared to that of the Indian nationalists he had encountered,
he made efforts to persuade both lascars on board the S.S. Alloway and the
diaspora populations of Indians in Panama, Japan, Shanghai, and Hong
Kong to embrace Indian nationalism. In Panama, Khan “quietly slipped
off the ship” and located the local Indian community, including a number
of Punjabi Sikhs who operated garages and car dealerships. The Indians
with whom he met were already familiar with the Ghadar Party, and Khan
reported that they were “captivated” by his news from New York and
accepted a bundle of books and pamphlets that he had brought on board.
Khan had similar experiences in Japan and Shanghai, where he engaged in
political discussions with members of the local Indian communities and
distributed copies of political literature. Khan’s efforts at both arms and
literature smuggling came to an end in Hong Kong, however, where he
was saved from arrest by a sympathetic shipmate, a “Greco-French” water
tender, who threw Khan’s pistols and revolutionary literature overboard
while he was being interrogated by a police officer.75
Khan’s experience illustrates how a commitment to nationalism and
revolutionary activities could form an important component of the lives of
Indian seamen.76 But although his association with both Bengali and
Ghadar Party revolutionaries is clear, the life of former lascar Henry Obed
suggests how maritime workers’ relationship to revolutionary politics was
often less clearly defined.77 Obed was born in 1895 in either Calcutta or
Lucknow as Abid Hussain. He worked as a proofreader in Calcutta before
marrying the daughter of a ship’s butler. He subsequently left Bengal as a
lascar and arrived in New York in October 1919 on board the S.S. Sag
Harbor. Obed’s subsequent career exemplifies the transnational mobility
of lascars and the difficulties they posed for both immigration authorities
and imperial intelligence agencies. He was one of fourteen seamen who
signed on to the Sag Harbor at the port of Nuevitas, Cuba; the ship’s
manifest listed his nationality not as Indian but as Maltese.78 On 18
October 1920, he was either discharged or deserted in New York City (IPI
believed the latter) after serving as a purser on a voyage of the Spartan
Prince from Hull.79 Over the next year, Obed continued to make voyages
between Latin America and the United States, but at some point, he left
North America and came to London.80
While IPI had little concrete information about Obed’s life and move-
ments prior to 1922, he left a more definitive imprint on the imperial
archive thereafter. In 1922, he applied for a new passport in London and
traveled to Hamburg, where he started an import-export business in asso-
ciation with the German firm Rud Schönheit & Co. There, he formed
relationships with both Indian communists and nationalist revolutionar-
ies. In 1923, he helped recruit Indian seamen to attend meetings of a
“Bolshevik Club” founded by M. N. Roy, who was living at the time in
Germany. A saloon boy on board the Matiana named Sheikh Fela told the
Calcutta Police about how Obed, whom he knew as Abid Hussain, had
taken him and another eleven Indian seamen to the club, where the orga-
nizers, including Roy, discussed the formation of an Indian seamen’s
union. The lascars also took away examples of Roy’s writings, although
Fela stated that none of them could read them. Following the meeting,
one of Roy’s associates, Mohammed Ali (also known as Ibrahim), advised
the men that firearms, which could be cheaply obtained in Hamburg, were
an eagerly sought-after and easily saleable commodity in Calcutta.81
Through Roy, Obed also may have made connections to Irish socialist
republicans, notably Roddy Connolly, who came to Hamburg shortly
after Obed’s arrival in order to meet with Roy. In the midst of the Irish
Civil War in September 1922, IPI reported that anti-Treaty “Irish
Republicans are buying arms and ammunition in large quantities from a
firm in Hamburg. The name and address of this firm are not at present
available. The firm have expressed their willingness to sell arms to Indians,
provided satisfy arrangements can be made for their safe delivery.”82
Evidence points to the Hamburg firm that attempted to supply arms to
both Irish and Indian revolutionaries as that owned by Henry Obed.83
Obed first came to the notice of the Bengal Police in 1923, when his
address was found in the possession of the brother of the Bengal revolu-
tionary Ullaskar Dutta. He left Hamburg the following year; British intel-
ligence believed that this was at the insistence of the Hamburg police, who
suspected him of cocaine smuggling. Obed then relocated to Antwerp,
where he married a German woman named Caroline Margaretta Homann
and opened a “seamen’s outfitter’s shop.” For the next decade, he was a
thorn in the side of British intelligence officers, who considered him a
prime supplier of arms to Indian revolutionaries. In November 1926, an
250 M. SILVESTRI
Indian seaman reported that a long discussion with Obed on “various sub-
jects” turned to the issue of arms smuggling:
I asked him about revolvers and their prices and whether he could arrange
to send revolvers. He told me that he sent “goods” to many places. One
serang [head of a lascar crew] of Dacca frequently takes revolvers from him.
I asked the name of the serang, but he did not tell me his name. He asked
me whether I required many revolvers and I replied in the affirmative. I
further inquired how he would arrange to send revolvers to Calcutta. He
gave me one of his cards, and instructed me to write in red ink on the back
of the card and send it through a known Indian seaman with half the price
of the revolvers.
Enquiries by the Calcutta Police in 1932 found that twenty-four revolvers

were obtained through Obed, while an Indian arms smuggler arrested two
years later stated that he had smuggled into Calcutta and sold more than
a hundred revolvers that he had purchased from Obed. IPI concluded that
“there is little doubt that this man is one of the chief sources of supply of
revolvers purchased by lascars in the Port of Antwerp for illicit sale
in India.”84
The IPI archive suggests that Obed combined a legitimate trade, first in
articles for seamen and later the business of live animal import-export,
with smuggling in arms and also drug smuggling. One problem for Indian
officials in preventing Obed’s involvement in the clandestine arms trade
was that there was nothing illegal about his alerting lascars to opportuni-
ties to purchase arms for re-sale in India, or even selling them arms. An
India Office official observed with exasperation in 1934, “Obed is a thor-
oughly bad hat, but the trouble is that there has never been enough evi-
dence against him.”85 The blurring of legal and illegal activities, as well as
Obed’s combination of anticolonial sentiment and desire for profit, accu-
rately reflects the liminal perspectives of many lascars, particularly those
who left the maritime life behind to settle in communities in Europe and
North America. His life stands as a striking example of the way in which
lascars were at times able, in Jonathan Hyslop’s phrase, “to slip around or
through the grids employers and officials set up to contain them.”86
In spite of concerns about Obed’s involvement with arms smuggling,
he traveled to India three times between 1930 and 1931, making visits to
his home in Lucknow with his wife, and twice more in 1934. After the
latter occasion, the Government of Bengal impounded and canceled his
passport; nonetheless he “succeeded in evading the surveillance of the

Bengal Police” seven months later and returned to Antwerp, paying
Rs. 400 to the captain of a Hansa line vessel to employ him as a ship’s
hand. When Obed applied for a new passport in 1936, IPI observed drily
that “now that he has succeeded in returning there without a passport
there does not seem much point in continuing to refuse him passport
facilities.”87 Nonetheless, Obed’s name was added to the list of “British
Indians to whom passport facilities should not be granted” without refer-
ence to the Passport Office or the Government of India (GOI). For sev-
eral years, IPI had nothing further to report about him, until he surfaced
in an unlikely locale during the early years of the Second World War. In
July 1940, Obed appeared in County Cork in southern Ireland along with
two German-South African men whose two suitcases contained eight
incendiary bombs, five canisters of explosives, and £800.88 Obed was sen-
tenced to seven years’ penal servitude by an Irish military tribunal, and
after protracted negotiations between Eire and the United Kingdom, was
returned to India in 1947.89
4 Lascars, Revolutionaries, and Arms Smuggling

Lascars and seamen were already the subject of surveillance, as imperial
authorities sought to prevent smuggling and illegal trade in various items.
Lascars who involved themselves in anticolonial politics and arms smug-
gling became the subjects of additional scrutiny from imperial intelligence
agencies; Khan and Obed represent only two of the best-documented
cases of these wider patterns of surveillance. In 1927, for example, Kunja
Chatarji, a saloon boy on the City of Valencia, drew the attention of IPI
for his alleged nationalist sympathies. While Chatarji’s involvement in
arms smuggling could not be confirmed, he attracted suspicion because of
his friendship with several Bengalis who had been detained on suspicion of
involvement in revolutionary activities, and because of his involvement
with suspected Indian arms smugglers in Glasgow and Antwerp. While in
Calcutta, he dressed in khadi, the coarse-spun Indian cloth promoted by
Gandhi that had become a symbol of Indian nationalism.90 Many examples
of lascar association with anticolonial movements were less clearly defined,
and less evidence exists in the colonial archive. A lascar named Sheikh
Karim, who provided information to the Calcutta Police in 1926, stated
that Bengalis at a Hamburg club, apparently similar to M. N. Roy’s earlier
club for seamen there, mixed with crews and distributed literature
252 M. SILVESTRI
c oncerning “Swadeshi matters.” It is not clear what the response of the

lascars was to this literature, but Karim reported that “the crews used to
take these papers on board ships and throw them in the sea after readings
their contents.” This was done not because of disagreement with the texts,
but to avoid Indian Customs officials finding them.91
While in the majority of cases arms smuggling seems to have been a way
for Indian seamen to supplement their meager pay, it risked fines and
imprisonment and involved conflict with police and port authorities, who
exercised increasing vigilance in searches for arms. While lascars appre-
hended with weapons or ammunition in the United Kingdom usually
faced fines, a term of imprisonment was the typical penalty for those found
with such goods in India. British intelligence officers acknowledged the
ingenuity of lascars in concealing weapons aboard ships in order to evade
customs searches. In 1928, for example, a police report noted the discov-
ery in an English port of six automatic pistols on board the Khiva “cun-
ningly concealed in casement over boilers in the engine room, supposedly
by some member of the Lascar firemen.” The crew of the ship had been
transferred to another vessel in dry dock, and police were unable to trace
the owners of the pistols.92
Some lascars were successful for many years at arms smuggling. Nazir
Ahmed from Chittagong District in eastern Bengal, a region whose labor
networks supplied many lascars to British shipping from the late eigh-
teenth century onward, reportedly smuggled more than thirty revolvers
into India and Burma over the course of eleven voyages before being
caught with two Spanish revolvers and a quantity of Belgian ammunition
while his ship was docked in Liverpool in August 1927. Ahmed was fined
40 shillings for each revolver plus 10/6 for interpreting fees.93 Others
were not so fortunate. In December 1924, customs authorities in Calcutta
discovered an automatic pistol and twenty rounds of ammunition in the
box of a fireman from Barbados named William Johnson. Johnson stated
that he had purchased the revolver from an Egyptian while the ship was
anchored for two weeks at Port Said. He was sentenced to one year’s
imprisonment under the Indian Arms Act.94
In spite of the arrests of attempted smugglers such as the unfortunate
Johnson, the cumulative amount of arms smuggled by lascars during the
1920s and 1930s was considerable. From October 1921 to September
1924, thirty cases of arms smuggling to India were reported by the
Government of India and IPI. Further, 101 rifles, 214 revolvers, 12 pis-
tols, and 245 rounds of ammunition were confiscated in India, while 56
pistols and over 4000 rounds of ammunition were found elsewhere.95 By

the late 1920s, the number of arms seizures was smaller, although incon-
sistent record-keeping makes it difficult to determine exactly how many
attempts by lascars to bring arms into India were thwarted. There were
thirty-four seizures of arms in India from September 1928 through June
1931, but the totals of arms seized were not listed in many cases. These
incidents did not include arms seized outside of India, such as when three
Indian seamen from the Northwest Frontier Province were arrested in
Middlesborough in August 1928 with fifteen revolvers and over 1200
rounds of ammunition.96 In 1932, the Director of the Intelligence Bureau
of the Government of India complained to IPI that “in spite of … preven-
tive measures, the fact remains that there is a steady stream of smuggled
firearms coming into India from Europe and elsewhere.”97
In addition to the importation by lascars of small quantities of weapons
and ammunition, larger-scale arms smuggling remained a goal of Indian
revolutionaries throughout the interwar period, and thus an omnipresent
concern for imperial intelligence. In 1931, for example, the Intelligence
Bureau reported an effort at arms smuggling possibly involving both the
Ghadar Party and Bengali revolutionaries. The Bengali revolutionary Rash
Behari Bose in Japan was involved in plans to import arms to the Bengal
revolutionaries in the 1920s, which involved having revolutionaries gain
employment as lascars. These arms-smuggling efforts illustrate how net-
works of Bengali revolutionaries extended throughout Southeast and East
Asia. In the mid-1920s, they included Bengali revolutionaries based at
Dakhineswar near Calcutta; the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA)
in the United Provinces; agents on steamships and in Singapore and
Rangoon; Bose in Japan; and Bose’s colleague Sachindra Sanyal, who had
been arrested and released for involvement in the Ghadar Party’s plans for
a wartime uprising and was now a part of the HRA. Based on investiga-
tions in Bengal and elsewhere, the Director of the Intelligence Bureau was
convinced of the evidence of “the systematic smuggling of arms from the
Far East.”98
In this case, 500 revolvers were reported to have been purchased in
Japan by Bose and a Bengali revolutionary named Jiten Bose in 1931 and
smuggled into Burma to another Bengali revolutionary, Trailakhya
Chakrabarti. The Bengal IB indicated that
This consignment has actually been landed at Rangoon, and that weapons
can be had on production of funds. It is certainly true that Bengali terrorists
254 M. SILVESTRI
believe this and are doing their best to raise the wind in order to take deliv-
ery. We hope that action taken under the Burma Ordinance has disorga-
nized their schemes but we are not nearer the discovery of the actual arms.99
In September 1930, the Intelligence Bureau received reports from

Shanghai that Bose had been in touch with Vitaly Primakov, former Soviet
military attaché in Japan, to arrange the shipment of 10,000 pistols and
small arms to Bengali and Punjabi revolutionaries. The intelligence “also
stated that when the actual revolution started in India, the Moscow
Government would send machine guns and rifles to India by sea.” Despite
the implausibility of such large-scale arms shipments by the Soviet govern-
ment, the Intelligence Bureau admitted a “great deal of anxiety” about
the prospects for smuggling, while IPI concluded that “the information in
our possession leaves little room for doubt that the Bengal revolutionists
are scheming to procure arms from abroad.”100
5 Imperial Intelligence Agencies

and Transnational Arms Smuggling
How did colonial authorities attempt to prevent persistent revolutionary
efforts to obtain arms? British efforts to counter arms smuggling offer an
example of the interplay of (and the tensions between) colonial intelli-
gence from the Indian provinces, the Intelligence Bureau in New Delhi,
and IPI and the India Office in London. At the same time as intelligence
efforts against arms smuggling into India illustrated the transnational net-
works of the empire and the growth of modern intelligence agencies, they
were also rooted in the experience of British colonial rule in India. Colonial
ethnography—in particular assumptions about Indian criminality—also
impacted the efforts of authorities to prevent the smuggling of arms
into Bengal.
British authorities deployed similar strategies against lascar smugglers as
they did against prominent anticolonial activists. During the interwar
period, as Daniel Brückenhaus has demonstrated, the British routinely
sought the assistance of continental European governments—notably
France and Germany—in matters of intelligence, police surveillance, and
requests for the deportation of prominent anticolonial activists in
Europe.101 British authorities used similar tactics against lascars suspected
of arms smuggling, utilizing the secret communications that comprised
the most important form of British cooperation with other European
overnments in the surveillance of anticolonialists.102 In 1927, for exam-

g
ple, British authorities made an unsuccessful appeal to the Belgian govern-
ment to deport Henry Obed because of his involvement in the arms
trade.103 Five years, the India Office contacted the Foreign Office in “an
effort … to enlist the cooperation of the authorities in the European
countries from which the arms are being imported into India.” At the
request of the India Office, the British ambassador in Belgium contacted
the Belgian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Paul Hymans, regarding a new
law requiring a permit for the possession of firearms, which the ambassa-
dor hoped might exercise “severer control” over the illicit arms trade
to India.104
In the case of arms smuggling, however, the main targets of British
intelligence and colonial authorities were not the elite anticolonial activists
who had taken up residence in continental European countries. Rather, it
was the transient and mobile population of lascars and seamen of other
nationalities on whom the authorities focused their attention. While occa-
sionally prominent brokers such as Obed were identified and efforts were
made to remove them from the European ports in which they operated,
the myriad small transactions of the clandestine arms trade required differ-
ent strategies, notably the tightening of surveillance on board ships and in
the ports in colonial India where arms were to be transferred to
revolutionaries.
As with other facets of the Bengali revolutionary movement, human
intelligence was the main means through which imperial intelligence agen-
cies sought to penetrate the world of the clandestine arms trade. In par-
ticular, the testimony of informers and agents enabled intelligence officers
to knit together the connections between revolutionaries and those buy-
ing and selling arms around the globe. An important source of informa-
tion for the arms trade was the agents placed in ports and on board ships.
Local police authorities in India, particularly those in Bengal and in neigh-
boring Burma, which emerged as an entry point for arms smuggling in the
1920s, made concerted efforts to place agents on board ships. A deck
steward named Mahomed Mofizuddin contributed to the 1927 arrest of
the ship’s butler Nazir Ahmad, whose case was discussed above. Mofizuddin
had been placed on the ship by a member of the Burma CID who was
aware of Ahmad’s alleged arms-smuggling activities. He took his role as an
agent seriously, even resorting to amateur sleuthing when they were ashore
in London. In his statement, Mofizuddin reported that Ahmed “went to
picture palaces and the Hippodrome, also in cafes, but I did not see him
256 M. SILVESTRI
get any revolvers.” Ahmed, however, rather unluckily confided in the

Burma CID’s agent that he had two revolvers hidden after the ship had
been searched, and Mofizuddin took this opportunity to inform the local
CID.105 Not all of these agents were so effective: an Englishman placed as
an agent by the Burma CID in order to gain information about European
sailors involved in arms smuggling seems to have taken the advance money
paid to him and produced no information of value. In fact, he managed to
get himself kicked off the ship where he worked and returned to Rangoon
to seek employment. An intelligence officer described him in 1924 as “a
liar and a waster.”106
Yet from the perspective of intelligence officers, agents yielded some
of the most revealing information about the arms trade. In the mid-
1920s, IPI made efforts to place agents on board ships traveling from
Europe to India. At a meeting held by IPI, Scotland Yard, and SIS in
1925, it was decided to employ agents among the crews of selected
steamers “to keep in touch with illicit arms traffic and report” to IPI.107
The previous year, IPI had sent an agent to Hamburg, at the time the
port of greatest concern for arms smuggling by lascars. The agent’s
report gave further confirmation to IPI of Henry Obed’s involvement in
the arms trade. Obed was linked to a Bengali named S. N. Mazumdar,
who was associated with a Calcutta trading company and claimed to be
an associate of M. N. Roy, as well as a former lascar named Mubarak Ali,
who was involved in Roy’s plans to smuggle communist literature to
India through sailors.108
The issue of arms smuggling was an important example of collabora-
tion between the Indian intelligence agencies, IPI, SIS, MI5, and Scotland
Yard in the interwar period. One venue for this was the Interdepartmental
Committee on Eastern Unrest (ICEU). In existence from 1922 to 1927,
the ICEU possessed the mandate of analyzing information regarding the
broad range of threats which seemed to be confronting the British
Empire. Foremost among these was the threat posed by Bolshevism, but
the activities of Indian revolutionaries and nationalism in India, Egypt,
and Turkey were also within the ICEU’s purview.109 Disrupting the
clandestine arms trade to anticolonial revolutionaries through what
India Office official J. W. Hose referred to as “police measures e.g. steps
to watch the smuggling of arms to the East” became an important
area of concern for the ICEU.110 In November 1924, following the dis-
cussion of a memo highlighting both the resurgence of the revolutionary
movement in Bengal and the role of weapons and ammunition
obtained from Europe in revolutionary activities, the ICEU formed a sub-

committee on the issue of arms traffic to Asia and to India in particular.
Chaired by MI5 director Vernon Kell, it included representatives from
MI1c (SIS) and Scotland Yard as well as IPI head John Wallinger.111 The
sub-committee agreed that a representative of the War Office, the India
Office, or Scotland Yard be deployed to ships on which arms were discov-
ered and that greater efforts should be made to create “a service of agents
in certain foreign ports commencing with Hamburg.”112 In the following
year, during a meeting of IPI, SIS, and Scotland Yard, Wallinger noted
that “our enquiries in Germany had not so far shown any very satisfactory
result.” The intelligence officers chose not to implement a suggestion
from Bengal authorities and the Intelligence Bureau to station a full-time
Indian agent in Hamburg, but did agree to deploy agents among the
crews on selected ships in order “to keep in touch with illicit arms traffic
and report” to IPI.113
IPI’s efforts to prevent arms smuggling reveal not only the coordina-
tion of imperial intelligence but also the tensions between different intel-
ligence agencies. Although arms smuggling was regarded as an important
issue for intelligence officers in London, New Delhi, and Calcutta alike, it
demonstrated the problems of coordinating large numbers of imperial
agencies to prevent the importation of arms. In 1924, Wallinger com-
plained to the India Office that the cooperation of the Intelligence Bureau
of the Government of India over the past three years had been “disap-
pointing.” IPI contended that the Intelligence Bureau did not follow up
on information supplied to them from London, such as a report from
Scotland Yard that a German company had sent almost 150 automatic
pistols to India in “samples of jam, fats, soap and margarine.” Indian offi-
cials, according to Wallinger, failed to supply IPI with intelligence such as
requested samples of weapons seized in Indian ports.114 The result was a
strongly worded letter from Malcolm Seton of the India Office to the
Government of India, stressing the importance of providing IPI with all
relevant information about arms smuggling detected or suspected both
within and outside India:
Care should be taken to keep I.P.I. informed of the result (whether useful or
not) of the enquiries made, or action taken, in India as regards each of the
reports sent from this country, and supplied with full details of all cases in
which arms are discovered in India on search of ships or otherwise. It is pos-
sible that if this were done the principal sources for the time of the dispatch
258 M. SILVESTRI
of arms from Europe could be identified and steps taken to close them. You
will see the practical importance for effective work at this end of getting
confirmation or corroboration,—or the opposite—from India of the reports
received here.115
In response, the Government of India assured Seton that it had taken

steps to provide information on response to IPI enquiries and that “special
measures are also being taken to tighten up the arrangements for the
detection of illicit imports.”116 Intelligence Bureau Director David Petrie
assured Wallinger that he was “going carefully into the whole question of
arms-smuggling,” and he believed that with the assistance of the Home
Department of the GOI, it would be possible to get customs officials to
tighten efforts to stop the importation of arms at Indian ports.117 The
subsequent relationship between IPI and the Intelligence Bureau regard-
ing arms smuggling appears to have been more satisfactory. Over the next
decade, New Delhi supplied a flow of information to London on the sub-
ject from provincial intelligence branches—mainly from Bengal and
Burma—including detailed reports on individual instances of arms sei-
zures and reports of agents and informers on arms trafficking.118
The prevention of arms smuggling was undoubtedly a priority which
both IPI and the Intelligence Bureau in New Delhi shared with the Bengal
Police Intelligence Branch in the interwar era. Yet arms smuggling to
Bengali revolutionaries, although substantial and global in its interconnec-
tions, formed only a subset of a larger movement of arms that posed a
potential threat to imperial authority. In the early decades of the twentieth
century, both the India Office and the Government of India expressed
particular concerns about the trafficking of arms from Djibouti and the
Horn of Africa to Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier of India.119 In
1917, the Foreign and Political Department of the India Office enthusias-
tically supported the recommendation of the Committee of Imperial
Defence to negotiate an international arms treaty at the postwar peace
conference. The Government of India compared the goal of eradicating
the international trade in arms to a moral crusade such as the struggle for
abolition, calling for “a campaign for the abolition of this iniquitous traf-
ficking in arms among uncivilized peoples.”120
Intelligence officers in Calcutta shared a similar understanding of the
global networks of the clandestine arms trade, in which the weapons
imported would end up most likely in the hands of assassins targeting
colonial officials. While IPI and to an extent the Intelligence Bureau in
New Delhi tended to privilege the threat posed by communist rather than
nationalist revolutionaries, the threat posed by nationalist revolutionaries
was paramount for the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch. For officers sta-
tioned in Bengal, the importation of weapons assumed particular impor-
tance as a direct threat to themselves and their colleagues. This was
illustrated by the unlikely case of the importation of thousands of German
bayonets, which were adapted into cutting apparatus described as “split-
ters.” The 18,000 splitters imported into Calcutta in 1923 were the result
of expatriate Indian networks. Nehal Singh, a representative of a Sikh firm
in Calcutta, had relocated to Hamburg and sent the bayonets from
Germany. Marketed as cutters for items such as betel nuts, the Government
of Bengal noted with alarm how the removal of one screw would leave an
otherwise intact bayonet and scabbard with a blunted end that could easily
be re-sharpened. The Calcutta Police recovered 8500 of the items, and the
importation of bayonets was banned by the Government of Bengal,
although three years later the Intelligence Bureau attempted to trace the
ultimate destination of 118 cases imported to London from Germany.121
6 “Terrorism” and “Goondaism”: Colonial

Legislation and the League of Nations
In 1932, IPI, SIS, and MI5 revisited the issue of arms smuggling, in light
of discussions by the Intelligence Bureau and the Home Department of
the Government of India about the continuing success of lascars in smug-
gling arms into India. In spite of “preventive measures” taken by the
Government of Bengal and other local governments, the Director of the
Intelligence Bureau wrote to IPI Director Philip Vickery that “the fact
remains that there is a steady stream of smuggled firearms coming into
India from Europe and elsewhere.”122 Vickery in turn raised the issue with
John Nott-Bower, future Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who
had just returned from service in the Indian Imperial Police to take up the
position of Chief Constable of a London district. He also discussed the
issue in detail with SIS, who informed him “that they are now in a much
better position to deal with this question than they were in 1925.”
Vickery’s opinion was that the “whole problem” should be reviewed in
detail prior to any change in arrangements.
In July 1932, another meeting about arms smuggling was held with
representatives of the India Office, including Seton, Vickery, Nott-Bower,
260 M. SILVESTRI
former Calcutta Police Commissioner Charles Tegart (now a member of

the Council of India), and representatives of SIS. Although the identities
of two men who attended the meeting have been redacted, Valentine
Vivian of SIS, another former Indian Police officer who was in attendance,
concurred with IPI’s judgment that the Secret Service was better prepared
to deal with the issue of arms smuggling than a decade earlier. He
emphasized that the failure of previous attempts to deal with the traffic to
India had been largely due to the lack of proper recognition of the now well-
established fact that this traffic is only on a small scale and is not worked
through the big international smuggling organizations. No organized
attempt to deal with the small fry had yet been undertaken.123
The consensus was that the two European ports of Antwerp and
Hamburg presented the greatest problem from a security standpoint.
Rotterdam was no longer considered to be a great source of arms smug-
gling, since Dutch authorities were “interested in stopping the illicit
export of arms to the Dutch East Indies, and the sale of arms is very care-
fully controlled.” In Hamburg, in contrast, although there were restric-
tions on the purchase of arms, Vivian reported that the police were “very
slack at present” in enforcing this, and in practice it was easy for “foreign,
and particularly coloured, seamen to purchase arms.” The consensus was
that “Antwerp was quite the most important danger spot,” since there
were no restrictions on arms purchase, although “the police were willing
to assist in procuring information in particular instances of purchases by
coloured seamen when asked to do so, though they could take no action
against the vendor.”124
Thus, after almost a decade of attention by imperial intelligence agencies,
the illicit transport and sale of arms was still believed to represent a potent
threat to the British rule in India. In response, intelligence officers and colo-
nial officials emphasized both local and global approaches to preventing arms
smuggling to Bengali revolutionaries. From London, a renewed effort was
made to appeal to British shipping companies, alerting them to the continued
sale of weapons to Indian revolutionaries by lascars and to the ports at which
they should exercise special vigilance over Asian sailors. The responses gener-
ally promised extra vigilance, and lascars seem to have been singled out for
extra attention from ships’ officers when returning from European ports. In
1933, the Secretary of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company
(P&O) wrote that after being made aware that Indian revolutionaries were
purchasing weapons in Marseilles, their agents contacted the local police,

“who assured them that the traffic in arms at that port was of small impor-
tance, but they believed Indian members of the crews sometimes bought
weapons there in very small quantities. On this being reported to us, we
instructed our Agents to see that every native member of the crew on
returning from the town to the ship, is searched for arms and ammunition,
and this is being done in every case.”125
The India Office and the Government of India also sought to use
efforts by the League of Nations to restrict international arms smuggling
and the transnational activities of Indian “terrorists” more generally.
Following the assassination of the King of Yugoslavia, Alexander I, in
Marseilles on 9 October 1934, the League took up the issue of terrorism,
which marked “the first robust debate among states on the subject.”126
The League’s discussions ultimately led to proposals for an international
convention on terrorism and an international criminal court, neither of
which was ultimately ratified. For this reason, the League’s proposal has
received relatively little attention in historical analyses of terrorism. Yet as
Ondrej Ditrych has recently observed, these unsuccessful pieces of legisla-
tion “laid the foundation of the first robust international regime to face
the new ‘global’ threat of terrorism by means of globalized surveillance,
normalized punishment of the terrorism, and discipline in terms of stipu-
lating what was the proper state behavior” regarding terrorists.127 Although
the British government pressed for the completion of the conventions,
they ultimately refused to sign them due to objections on constitutional
grounds by the Home Office.128 In particular, the Home Office believed
that the convention defined terrorism too broadly and that the treaty
would mostly lead to requests for extradition from nations with authori-
tarian regimes such as Germany and Italy.129
The India Office and the Government of India, in contrast, harbored
few concerns about civil liberties and reacted enthusiastically to the pros-
pect of an international accord on terrorism, which they hoped could be
used to staunch both the movements of Indian revolutionaries and the
flow of arms to Indian terrorists. IPI expressed the hope that the conven-
tion would include a “comprehensive and strictly operated licensing sys-
tem for the sale and possession of revolvers and pistols,” as well as measures
which would allow the suppression of Ghadar Party activities in California,
in particular their use of false passports.130 The Government of India was
equally enthusiastic.131 Citing both the Ghadar Party and Rash Behari
Bose’s use of Japan as a base for revolutionary planning, the GOI
262 M. SILVESTRI
expressed the hope that an international accord on terrorism might sup-

press the “giving of asylum to Indian terrorist criminals by foreign coun-
tries” and “the formation of terrorist conspiracies by Indians abroad
directed against persons in India.” The issue of arms smuggling was also
paramount for New Delhi. C. M. Trivedi of the Government of India
sought “to emphasise the keen interest taken by the Government of India
in the proposed Convention, more particularly in the use which may be
made of it for the solution of the long-standing problem of arms
smuggling.”132
Imperial intelligence agencies shared the concern of the Indian authori-
ties with the threat of arms smuggling, and representatives of both MI5
and the India Office attempted to persuade the Home and Foreign Offices
of the importance of the issue. In spite of the transnational dimensions of
Indian revolutionary activity, however, the latter did not regard terrorism
as a domestic problem for the United Kingdom. The India Office contin-
ued to press the importance of the issue and the need to understand the
“difficulties of the Government of India” in confronting it. “I do not need
to remind you,” wrote Findlater Stewart of the India Office to the Home
Office, “of the difficulties with which [Governor of Bengal John] Anderson
has been faced by reason of the recrudescence of terrorism in Bengal and
I am sure you will appreciate our desire to do everything in our power to
help him in his campaign against this menace.”133
Following two further meetings with the Home and Foreign Offices in
April 1935, the India Office succeeded in having British representatives
advocate a system of registration for weapon manufacturers and the indi-
vidual numbering of weapons produced. As Robert Peel of the India
Office explained to Home Office representatives, this was something that
would be a boon to imperial intelligence agencies:
I explained that no system of control of manufacture of sale of arms could

by itself stop smuggling which was the problem that the Government of
India had to face and that it was therefore essential that a system should be
devised whereby smuggled arms seized could be traced back to their origin.
Provided that the Government of India knew the places from which arms
were likely to be obtained by seamen and other smugglers, it was possible
for them to take steps to watch and have searched ships arriving from such
places.134
The final version of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of
Terrorism produced by the League of Nations included an article whose
language had been supplied by the India Office requiring serial numbers
or other identifying marks to be placed on firearms, which were to be
recorded by both manufacturers and retailers.135
While the India Office and the Government of India attempted to make
use of international agencies and new categorizations of international ter-
rorism to prevent the flow of arms to revolutionaries, legislation passed by
the Government of Bengal illustrates how colonial authorities’ efforts to
prevent arms smuggling were also deeply rooted in the practices of colo-
nial rule. In 1934, the Government of Bengal implemented special legisla-
tion known as the Bengal Smuggling of Arms Act. The Act represented a
shift in approaches to the colonial policing of arms smuggling, for it tar-
geted not lascars or other seamen, but the middlemen and brokers who
purchased arms from maritime workers and sold them to the representa-
tives of revolutionary groups. The legislation arose because of the ways in
which lascars adapted their strategies for selling arms to revolutionaries in
response to colonial efforts to suppress the arms trade. While R. N. Reid
of the Government of Bengal noted in 1933 that many seamen had been
arrested in recent years for attempting to sell arms to police officers in
disguise, he added that lascars “are believed now to sell their arms mostly
through the medium of recognized brokers. These brokers usually confine
themselves to the negotiation of sales and purchases and seldom retain the
weapons in their own possession.”136
The Smuggling of Arms Act gave powers to judicial tribunals to extern
those defined as arms dealers from the province of Bengal. It also allowed
for secret judicial proceedings to determine the guilt or innocence of sus-
pected arms dealers, while judges were relieved of the responsibility to
follow normal rules of evidence in order to preserve the identity of police
informers.137 The Act followed standard judicial practices used to detain
and convict suspected revolutionaries in terms of its use of in camera pro-
ceedings in which judges rather than juries considered evidence and issued
judgments. Yet the Smuggling of Arms Act was explicitly modeled not on
prior legislation that dealt with revolutionaries, but with efforts to regu-
late what was regarded as a particularly Indian form of criminality: the
urban criminal known as the “goonda.” The “goonda,” defined rather
imprecisely as “a hooligan or other rough,” was seen as a product of the
increased industrialization of and immigration to Bengal in the early twen-
tieth century.138 Although the correlation between increased criminal
264 M. SILVESTRI
activity and urbanization was mixed and the “goondas” themselves were
an extremely heterogeneous group that included Hindus, Muslims, and
Anglo-Indians, as well as both Bengalis and Indians from other provinces,
the Bengal authorities nonetheless regarded them as a unitary group.139
By the early 1920s, the Government of Bengal was convinced that the
problem of “goondaism” in Calcutta had reached such proportions that
extraordinary measures were necessary to deal with it.140 In 1920, a request
to deport a number of men identified as goonda leaders from the province
under the 1915 Defence of India Act was rejected by the Government of
India. In the following year, the Government of Bengal contended that
there was an explicitly political dimension to goondaism and that goondas
formed a large component of the membership of Gandhi’s noncoopera-
tion movement in Calcutta. The Governor of Bengal complained that the
noncooperators were “now very largely recruited from the goondas and
riff-raff of the city.”141 In 1923, the Government of Bengal passed the
Goondas Act, which allowed it, on the recommendation of the
Commissioner of the Calcutta Police, to remove from Calcutta and neigh-
boring districts without trial or further legal proceeding any goonda who
had committed or was suspected of being about to commit a crime.142 In
effect, the law empowered the police to define anyone with a criminal
record as a “goonda” and compel them to leave Calcutta.143 Despite the
heterogeneity of the goondas’ social, religious, and ethnic backgrounds,
and the unexceptional nature of many of their criminal acts, police files
transformed these ordinary individuals into “extraordinary criminals.”144
The Goondas Act was thus a prominent example of how, as Taylor Sherman
has observed, “the regular resort to exceptional measures designed for
particular classes was normalized within India’s coercive networks.”145
Like the colonial categories of criminal tribes and thugs, goondas were not
only defined as extraordinary and collective threats to public order, but
the police and legal procedures designed to neutralize them were seen as
relevant to the colonial state’s efforts to defeat the Bengali
revolutionaries.
The Smuggling of Arms Act, which targeted a “class” of brokers with
whom seamen were believed to do business, resembled the Goondas Act
in its exceptional nature. As with the effort to control revolutionary dacoit
gangs with legislation aimed at “criminal tribes” prior to the Great War, a
law that targeted a specifically “Indian” type of criminality was passed in
order to control the flow of arms to revolutionaries.146 In response to the
protestations of a Bengali member of the Bengal Legislative Council that
the proceedings under the Act should be conducted in open court, R. N.
Reid of the Government of Bengal argued that the legislation “is based on
a similar clause in the Goondas Act, and I submit that if that clause has
been found suitable for dealing with the goondas, it is infinitely more suit-
able for dealing with the sort of people that we are trying to get at, that is
to say, people who are supplying arms to the terrorists.”147
One person targeted by the legislation was the intelligence agencies’
bête noire, Henry Obed. Although Obed succeeded in traveling to India in
December 1934, the Government of Bengal impounded and canceled his
passport on 11 February 1935 and attempted to prosecute him under the
Smuggling of Arms Act. The two judges in Calcutta who examined Obed’s
case, however, concluded that “the sale and possession of firearms without
license is no offense in Belgium, and there is nothing on record to show
that the activities of the subject extend any further than the sale of arms to
Indian seamen. It is these seamen who are the smugglers and the subject
cannot be held liable just because he is their source of supply.”148 In
September 1935, Obed successfully evaded the surveillance of the Bengal
Police and made his way back to Antwerp.
* * *
The Smuggling of Arms Act represented a typical colonial response to

issues of public order and criminality. “Arms smugglers,” like “goondas”
and “criminal tribes” (or indeed, “Bengali terrorists”), were believed to be
a group that could be understood, classified, and—through secret judicial
proceedings—punished by the colonial state. Yet the files on arms smug-
gling in British imperial archives should lead us to question these modes
of colonial categorization. As this chapter has shown, the Bengal revolu-
tionaries’ plans to secretly obtain large shipments of weapons both during
and after the First World War were never successful. Yet smaller-scale arms-
smuggling efforts throughout the interwar era represented a persistent
threat to British authorities, particularly in Bengal, where the weapons
were used to target prominent colonial officials.
These efforts to obtain arms from Europe, Asia, and North America
reveal the depth and complexity of anti-imperial networks during the
interwar years. As Tim Harper has observed, “for anti-colonialists, the
global webs of empire had created new possibilities for challenging it.”149
Bengal revolutionaries allied with, negotiated with, and dealt with a wide
range of different groups within the British Empire and beyond in order
266 M. SILVESTRI
to obtain the firearms which were so difficult to obtain in colonial India.

These included other revolutionaries, nationalists, and anticolonial
activists; European, West Indian, and Chinese sailors; merchants in

European ports; and various intermediaries who sought profits from con-
stant demand for weapons. A particularly important group, as this chapter
has argued, were the Indian sailors known as lascars. Lascars had diverse
motives for their involvement with the clandestine arms trade; most were
interested in profit, though some sympathized with the nationalist and
anticolonial revolutionaries. They saw risk, but also opportunities, in their
dealings with the revolutionaries or the middlemen who bought and sold
weapons. The lascars’ relationship to the revolutionaries demonstrated
how the revolutionary movement in Bengal extended well beyond the
bhadralok Hindus who made up the vast majority of the membership of
the revolutionary groups.
At the same time as revolutionaries sought to utilize the webs of empire
and networks beyond it to obtain arms and bring them safely to Bengal,
intelligence officers in London, New Delhi, Calcutta, and other locations
sought to prevent this trade. They worked to understand the patterns by
which weapons came from European or Asian ports to Bengal, and to
penetrate the networks that made these journeys possible. These intelli-
gence officers worked to contain the clandestine arms trade in multiple
ways. They utilized familiar methods from the anti-terrorist campaign in
Bengal, such as the use of agents and informers (in ports and on board
ships) in an effort to penetrate the subaltern world of maritime smuggling.
Other efforts involved methods which were most typically used against
elite Indian and Asian anticolonialists: diplomatic discussions with
European nations and the attempt to use international treaties to disrupt
the arms trade.
While the intelligence archive also reveals tensions between intelligence
officers in London, New Delhi, and Calcutta, who had varying estima-
tions of the threat posed by and solutions to arms smuggling, they also
demonstrate the important role played by the Indian Political Intelligence
in monitoring and coordinating efforts to prevent the smuggling of arms
to the revolutionaries. Colonial arms smuggling was thus neither a story
of grand revolutionary conspiracies nor of seamless anticolonial intelli-
gence work. The many individual cases of arms smuggling in the 1920s
and 1930s, however, demonstrate the transnational dimensions of both
revolutionary nationalism and imperial intelligence. The final chapter will
further explore the widening scope of imperial intelligence through the

careers of some of the most prominent Indian Police and Indian Civil
Service officers involved in the policing of the Bengali revolutionary
movement. A number of these colonial servants forged careers as imperial
intelligence officers as they were deployed in Europe, North America, and
Asia in an effort to counter anticolonial activists in the British Empire and
the wider world.

London
CS Chief Secretary
University
IO India Office
London
Pol Political
Sec. Secretary
Bengal, 1995)
268 M. SILVESTRI
Notes
1. “List of Outrages, 1931. Part A,” in TIB VI: 757–758.
2. As Durba Ghosh observes, carefully crafted statements by female Bengali
revolutionaries emphasizing their “feminine nature” tended to obscure
their radicalism and their commitment to the revolutionary societies.
Durba Ghosh, “Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal,
1930 to the 1980s,” Gender & History 25: 2 (2013), 356.
3. Jackson to Hoare, 11 February 1932, Templewood Collection, MSS Eur.
E 240, APAC BL.
4. Minutes of IO arms conference, July 1932, L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.
5. Extracts from Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, GOI,
14 April 1932, L/P&J/12/391, APAC BL.
6. Durba Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in the Interwar
Years,” in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring Empire:
Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Delhi: Orient Longman,
2006), 272.
7. Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 148.
8. Tony Ballantyne, “Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-
State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond),” in Antoinette
Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the
Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 112–113.
9. This has recently been highlighted in scholarship on the relationship
between Ireland and India within the British Empire, notably by Barry
Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks: Migration, Social Communication and
Exchange in Nineteenth-Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012).
10. Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
“Introduction: Circulation and Society under Colonial Rule,” in
Markovits, Pouchepadass, and Subrahmanyam, eds., Society and
Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia 1750–
1950 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 3.
11. Gopalan Balachandran, “Circulation through Seafaring: Indian Seamen,
1890–1945,” in Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, eds., Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant
Cultures in South Asia 1750–1950 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 94.
12. Simon J. Potter, “Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the
Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire,”
Journal of British Studies 46: 3 (2007), 621–646 (quotation on 622).
13. Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial
Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2018), 374.
14. See Chap. 4.
15. One exception was the arms trade involving the trans-border Pathan
tribes of the Northwest Frontier of India. In the first decade of the twen-
tieth century, large quantities of arms reached the Indian-Afghanistan
border from the Persian Gulf. See T. R. Moreman, “The Arms Trade and
the North-West Frontier Pathan Tribes, 1890–1914,” Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History 22: 2 (1994), 187–216.
16. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (New Delhi: People’s
Publishing House, 1973), 484. Peter Heehs has aptly titled his history of
the rise of the revolutionary terrorist movement The Bomb in Bengal.
17. The Bengal Police Intelligence Branch considered the discovery of a
“bomb factory” at Dakhineswar in the 24 Parganas District near Calcutta,
10 November 1924, to be one of the major events in the resurgence of
the revolutionary campaign in the 1920s. Nine revolutionaries were
arrested (and convicted under proceedings under the Bengal Criminal
Law Amendment Act), together with firearms, ammunition, “formulae
and instructions for the preparation of explosives, notes of thermit weld-
ing, sulphuric acid, nitric acid and other ingredients for the manufacture
of explosives, [and] a collection of test tubes and retorts.” The IB noted
that the instructions for the preparations for explosives were little altered
from those recovered from the Manicktolla headquarters of the revolu-
tionaries in 1908. “Terrorist Conspiracy in Bengal from 1st April to 31st
December 1925,” (1926) in TIB I: 459–460.
18. Moreman, “The Arms Trade,” 188.
19. T. R. Moreman writes that “the possession of a rifle became a symbol of
individual prestige,” as well as a practical means of pursuing blood feuds.
One colonial official in the Punjab observed in 1900 that “a rifle to a hill
Pathan is literally the breath of life.” Moreman, “The Arms Trade,” 189.
20. Michael Silvestri, “Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita and Dan Breen:
Terrorism in Bengal and its Relation to the European Experience,”
Terrorism and Political Violence 21: 1 (2009), 10.
21. Sedition Committee Report (1918; reprint New Delhi, 1973), 66. The
Sedition Committee also noted that 31 of the pistols had been recovered
by the Bengal Police. Although many of the pistols were ultimately ruined
when they were hidden in Bengal’s damp climate, many were utilized by
revolutionaries within and outside of Bengal. R. E. A. Ray, Notes on draft
of To Guard My People, Ch. 22, p. 11, Indian Police Collection, MSS Eur.
F 161/257, APAC BL.
22. A. N. Moberly, Officiating CS to GOB to Sec. to Home, GOI, 1
September 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.
270 M. SILVESTRI
23. Extract from Bengal Legislative Council Debates, p. 92, 10 January
1934, L/P&J/7/619, APAC BL.
24. For the arms-smuggling attempts of the Ghadar Party, see Maia Ramnath,
Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism
and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley and London:
University of California Press, 2011) and Heather Streets-Salter, World
War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of
Global Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
25. Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia, 115.
26. C. Desmond Greaves, Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 205.
27. Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory
28. Note on Tarak Nath Das, 8 March 1923, L/P&J/12/166, APAC BL.
29. Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence, No. 1, 1 March 1922,
30. See Chap. 5.
31. Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical
Connections, 1919–1964 (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2008), 18; and P. Biggane, “Indian Revolutionaries,”
p. 43. L/P&J/12/117, APAC BL.
32. “The Activities of the Revolutionists in Bengal Subsequent to the
Amnesty Following the Royal Proclamation, December 1919,” p. 3,
33. P. Biggane, “Indian Revolutionaries,” 42–43, L/P&J/12/117, APAC
BL.
34. A notable example was the attempt to smuggle almost 500 Thompson
submachine guns aboard the East Side from Hoboken, New Jersey, in
1921.
35. Peter Hart, “The Thompson Submachine Gun in Ireland Revisited,” in
his The I.R.A. at War 1916–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 183–184 (quotation on 183).
36. Hart, “The Thompson Submachine Gun,” 192.
37. Wallinger to Hose, 14 October 1925, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL. While
100 sporting rifles and 288 automatic pistols were seized by customs
authorities in Colombo from a single ship (on 7 July 1924), the rest of
the shipments were small ones.
38. Clipping from Straits Budget, 5 June 1930, CO 273/566/10, NA UK.
39. Governor, Straits Settlements, to Colonial Secretary, 19 September.
1930, CO 273/566/10, NA UK.
the 31st March 1925,” (1925) in TIB I: 381–382.

the 31st March 1925,” (1925) in TIB I: 381–382; and O. Cleary,
Intelligence Bureau, to Wallinger, 30 April 1925, L/P&J/12/78, APAC
BL. Cleary’s report to Wallinger stated that two of the Chinese men had
been arrested, when the revolutionaries were unable to raise the funds to
purchase the eight revolvers, and the Bengal Police arranged for a “bogus
purchaser” in order to make the arrest.
42. Note by H. LeMesurier, 5 July 1908, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No.
390/C of 1909, WBSA.
43. Bengal Police Annual Administration Report (1913), 35.
44. Statement of arms smuggling into India from October 1921 to September
1924, enclosure to Wallinger to Hose, 10 October 1924, L/P&J/12/78,
APAC BL.
45. Extract from statement of S. K. Niyamath, enclosure to Intelligence
Bureau, GOI, to J. A. Wallinger, 4 December 1924, L/P&J/12/78,
APAC BL.
46. B. Vogt, Norwegian Legation, London, to Austen Chamberlain, Foreign
Secretary, 26 April 1927, P&J No. 1057 of 1927, L/P&J/6/1939,
APAC BL.
47. W. D. R. Prentice, CS to GOB, to IO, 5 July 1927; and “Copy of judg-
ment in the case of Emperor versus E. Johnson and H. Drendahl under
section 19 F Arms Act,” 25 March 1927, P&J No. 1057 of 1927,
L/P&J/6/1939, APAC BL. Both Prentice’s letter and the court judg-
ment were forwarded by the Foreign Office to the Norwegian Legation.
48. Telegram, Sec. of State to Viceroy, 28 February 1934; and Intelligence
Bureau to IPI, 7 November 1934; L/P&J/12/85, APAC BL; and Straits
Times, 3 May 1935.
49. Straits Times, 3 May 1935.
50. IPI similarly regarded Chinese arms smugglers as a threat. After consult-
ing Home Office files in March 1925, Wallinger advised the Intelligence
Bureau that “large consignments” of arms were being shipped primarily
from Hamburg to Hong Kong through a Chinese intermediary named
Choy Loy in London. He further advised Indian intelligence to be aware
that “Indian extremists who visit Hamburg are surely aware of Choy’s
activities and may use him as their agent in furtherance of their own arms
traffic.” Wallinger to Petrie, 4 March 1925, L/P&J/12/79, APAC BL.
51. Report by B. N. Banarji, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, 22
July 1933, L/P&J/12/84, APAC BL.
52. Jennifer Liang, “Migration Patterns and Occupational Specialisations of
Kolkata Chinese: An Insider’s History,” China Report 43: 4 (2007),
397–410.
272 M. SILVESTRI
53. August Peter Hansen, Memoirs of an Adventurous Dane in India 1904–

1947 (London: BASCA, 1999), 203.
54. Report by B. N. Banarji, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, 22
July 1933, L/P&J/12/84, APAC BL.
55. The German Hansa line was the second-largest employer of lascars after
the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. Balachandran,
“Circulation through Seafaring,” 94–98.
56. Laura Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in
Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1994).
57. Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice,’ 42.
58. Jonathan Hyslop, “Steamship Empire: Asian, African and British Sailors
in the Merchant Marine c.1880–1945,” Journal of Asian and African
Studies 44: 49 (2009), 51; and Balachandran, “Circulation through
Seafaring,” 92. Balachandran makes this comment in reference to the
lives and experiences of lascars in Britain.
59. Ali Raza and Benjamin Zachariah, “To Take Arms Across a Sea of
Trouble: The ‘Lascar System,’ Politics and Agency in the 1920s,”
Itinerario 36: 3 (2012), 19–38.
60. Jonathon Hyslop, “Zulu Sailors in the Steamship Era: The African
Modern in the World Voyage Narratives of Fulunge Mpofu and George
Magodini, 1916–1924,” in Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid, eds., Critical
Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below (London and
New York: Routledge, 2014), 138.
61. Raza and Zachariah, “To Take Arms,” 23.
62. Charles Tegart, “The Indian Communist Party,” 9 October 1922,
63. Bald, Bengali Harlem, 148.
64. Suchetana Chattopadhyay, “The Bolshevik Menace: Colonial Surveillance
165 (2006), 165–179 (quotation on 175).
65. Raza and Zachariah have identified four different types of lascars: those
who worked as seamen full-time, those who used the networks of lascars
as “a front for their political activism,” those for whom being a lascar was
only a form of temporary employment and lastly those who moved from
work as a lascar to political activism. Raza and Zachariah, “To Take
Arms,” 26.
66. Bald, Bengali Harlem, 150.
67. Bald, Bengali Harlem.
68. Hasan N. Gardezi, ed. Chains to Lose: Life and Struggles of a Revolutionary:
Memoirs of Dada Amir Haider Khan, 2 vols. (Karachi: Pakistan Study
Centre, University of Karachi, 2007), I: 169–171.
69. See Silvestri, Ireland and India, 13–45.

70. See, for example, Agnes Smedley, FOFI, to Frank P. Walsh, 21 August
1920, Frank P. Walsh Collection, Box 9, New York Public Library.
Smedley wrote to alert Walsh, a supporter of both labor and anticolonial
movements, to the low wages and poor working conditions of lascars, and
to urge that “organized American seamen open their eyes to the necessity
of organizing Indian seamen, that racial prejudice against them be
eliminated.”
71. Gardezi, Chains to Lose, I: 234.
72. Gardezi, Chains to Lose, I: 236. Smedley played an important role in the
Friends of Freedom for India after being introduced to radical Indian
anticolonial politics through the Ghadar Party; see Ruth Price, The Lives
of Agnes Smedley (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),
34–87.
73. Gardezi, Chains to Lose, I: 233 and 243.
74. Gardezi, Chains to Lose, I: 245–247.
75. Gardezi, Chains to Lose, I: 251, 257–258, 261–262, and 264–274.
76. Cf. the analysis of Jonathan Hyslop, which stresses the agency of lascars,
but also emphasizes their involvement in “the petty trade of smuggling”
rather than their engagement with revolutionary or nationalist politics.
Jonathan Hyslop, “Guns, Drugs and Revolutionary Propaganda: The
Smuggling of Indian Sailors in the 1920s,” South African Historical
Journal 61: 4 (2009), 838–846 (quotation on 840).
77. Unless otherwise noted, information about Obed in the following para-
graphs is taken from his history sheet, 26 April 1934, L/P&J/12/477,
APAC BL.
78. “List or Manifest of [Aliens] Employed on the Vessel as Crew” for the
S.S. Sag Harbor, 19 October 1919, available at ancestryinstitution.com.
Accessed 18 November 2014.
79. “Index to Alien Crewmen Who were Discharged or Who Deserted at
New York, New York, May 1917–November 1957”; and “List or Manifest
of Aliens Employed on the Vessel as Members of Crew” for the
S.S. Spartan Prince, 19 October 1920. Both available at ancestryinstitu-
tion.com. Accessed 18 November 2014.
80. As “Henri Obed” he was the chief steward on a voyage of the Korean
Prince from Santos, Brazil to New Orleans in the spring of 1921. Obed
was engaged on the Korean Prince in New York on 4 November 1920.
“List or Manifest of Aliens Employed on the Vessel as Members of Crew”
for the Korean Prince, 8 May 1921, available at ancestryinstitution.com.
Accessed 18 November 2014.
81. Sheikh Fela told the police that “we were afraid to purchase any revolver
there as customs officers searched us in every port.” “Indian Communist
Party,” 10 September 1923, L/P&J/12/52, APAC BL.
274 M. SILVESTRI
82. “Indian Communist Party,” 30 September 1922, L/P&J/12/46, APAC

BL.
83. O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, 17–18.
84. IPI to R. Peel, 30 July 1934, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.
85. Note by Clausen, IO, 27 April 1934, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.
86. Hyslop, “Steamship Empire,” 64.
87. IPI to Johnston, IO, 11 February 1936, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.
88. IPI memo, 20 July 1940, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.
89. See O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, 140–144.
90. “Note on persons employed on steamers who are known or suspected to
be concerned in Arms’ smuggling,” [1927], L/P&J/12/82, APAC BL.
91. Extract from information supplied by Sheikh Karim [nd], enclosure to
Intelligence Bureau, GOI, to Wallinger, 23 July 1925, L/P&J/12/78,
APAC BL.
92. IPI to Peel, 29 August 1928, L/P&J/12/83, APAC BL.
93. “Note on persons employed on steamers who are known or suspected to
be concerned in Arms’ smuggling” [1927]; and Extract from New
Scotland Yard Report dated 7th September 1927, L/P&J/12/82, APAC
BL.
94. IPI to Hose, IO, 19 January and 28 February 1925, L/P&J/12/79,
APAC BL.
95. Wallinger to Hose, IO, 10 October 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.
96. See the Statements of Arms and Ammunition Seized by Customs Officials
in India and Ceylon in L/P&J/12/83, APAC BL.
97. Intelligence Bureau, Home, GOI, to IPI, 3 May 1932, L/P&J/12/91,
APAC BL.
98. Extract from Report of Director, Intelligence Bureau, GOI, 22 April
1926, L/P&J/12/163, APAC BL. Noting both Sachindra Sanyal’s con-
nections to Bose and the HRA, the Bengal Police IB concluded that
Sanyal was “deeply connected in a conspiracy to smuggle arms and
ammunition into India from the Far East.” “Statement of Persons
Arrested and Detained under (1) Regulation III of 1818, (2) Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, (3) Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act, 1925.”—“Irreconcilables.” Lytton Collection, MSS
Eur. F 160/37, APAC BL.
99. Intelligence Bureau, GOI, to IPI, 3 March 1931, L/P&J/12/83, APAC
BL.
100. Intelligence Bureau, GOI, to IPI, 3 March 1931; and IPI to Peel, IO, 31
March 1931; L/P&J/12/83, APAC BL.
101. Daniel Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism
and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017).
102. “When analyzing the chances for success of … government efforts to

work across national borders, it is important to distinguish systematically
between official, open cooperation and hidden cooperation behind the
scenes.” Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest, 108.
103. IPI to Clausen, IO, 26 April 1934, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.
104. R. J. Peel to Under Sec. of State, Foreign Office, 19 July 1932; and
Granville Leveson-Gower to Paul Hymans, Minister for Foreign Affairs,
28 July 1932. L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.
105. Copy of statement of Mahomed Mofizuddin, 26 August 1927,
106. O. Cleary, Intelligence Bureau, GOI, to Wallinger, 17 December 1924,
107. Notes of a Meeting Held at Scotland House, 19 June 1925,
108. IPI note, “Indian Communist Party,” 3 September 1924, L/P&J/12/78,
APAC BL.
109. John Fisher, “The Interdepartmental Committee on Eastern Unrest and
British Responses to Bolshevik and Other Intrigues against the Empire
during the 1920s,” Journal of Asian Studies 34: 1 (2000), 1–34.
110. Cited in Fisher, “British Responses,” 14. As John Fisher observes, the
ICEU’s focus was in reality much wider than arms smuggling. Although
its meetings grew less frequent after 1922, its purview actually widened as
the committee “correlated secret information about anti-British activities
in Asia and northern and central Africa,” and distributed it to relevant
government departments. In spite of the widespread approval for its for-
mation, SIS and Foreign Office became particularly opposed to the com-
mittee, believing that it was inefficient and its membership too large for
the consideration of secret information. The committee ceased to exist in
1927.
111. Sub-committee of ICEU minutes, 10 November. 1924, L/P&J/12/91,
APAC BL.
112. Sub-committee of ICEU minutes, 10 November 1924, L/P&J/12/91,
APAC BL.
113. Telegram from Viceroy to Sec. of State, 5 January 1925; and Notes of a
Meeting Held at Scotland House, 19 June 1925. L/P&J/12/91, APAC
BL.
114. Wallinger to Hose, IO, 10 October 1924; and Malcolm Seton, IO, to
J. Crerar, GOI, 16 October 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.
115. Malcolm Seton, IO, to J. Crerar, GOI, 16 October 1924, L/P&J/12/78,
APAC BL.
116. Crerar to Seton, 13 November 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL. In a
subsequent letter in the file, Crerar added that regarding the cases of lack
276 M. SILVESTRI
of cooperation cited by Wallinger, the information was either “too vague

to be acted upon” or the Intelligence Bureau had not been informed. In
one instance, a warning about the potential import of miniature
Thompson submachine guns to India had turned out to be simply a copy
of a newspaper advertisement. The Intelligence Bureau had in fact already
been informed of this by the Burma Police. Crerar to Seton, 20 November
1924.
117. D. Petrie to Wallinger, 4 November 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.
118. See, for example, the report on the weapon and cartridges seized on 31
October 1927 from Fazel Mohammed, fireman on board the SS Baron
Haig, L/P&J/12/82; and Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special
Branch, Calcutta, Report of “S-48, dated the 28th of November, 1927,”
119. Moreman, “The Arms Trade.”
120. Foreign and Political Dept., GOI, to Sir Edwin Montagu, Sec. of State,
21 December 1917, RECO 1/341, NA UK.
121. See the correspondence in L/P&J/12/90, APAC BL. It is not clear from
the file whether the Intelligence Bureau was able to locate the “splitters”
imported in 1926.
122. Intelligence Bureau, GOI, to IPI, 3 May 1932; and “Proceedings of the
Conference held in the Honorable the Home Member’s room at 11 A.M.
on Friday, the 27th May 1932,” L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.
123. Minutes of Arms Conference, July 1932, L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.
124. Minutes of Arms Conference, July 1932, L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.
125. Sec., P&O, to Undersec. of State, IO, 31 January 1933, L/P&J/12/92,
APAC BL.
126. Ondrej Ditrych, “‘International Terrorism’ as Conspiracy: Debating
Terrorism in the League of Nations,” Historical Social Research /
Historische Sozialforschung 38: 1 (2013), 200–210 (quotation on 200).
127. Ditrych, “‘International Terrorism’ as Conspiracy,” 200.
128. See Martin David Dubin, “Great Britain and the Anti-Terrorist
Conventions of 1937,” Terrorism and Political Violence 5: 1 (1993),
1–29; and the correspondence from the India Office and the Government
of India in L/P&J/8/582 and L/P&J/8/583, APAC BL.
129. As Mary Barton has recently argued, these Home Office officials, who
rarely referenced political violence in the Empire, viewed “English culture
and law as protective of civil liberties and distinctly different from the
authoritarian regimes engulfing Europe.” Mary Barton, “The British
Empire and International Terrorism: India’s Separate Path at the League
of Nations, 1934–1937,” Journal of British Studies 56 (April 2017), 351–
373 (quotation on 363). Barton provides the most comprehensive and
convincing analysis of the British and British Indian responses to the

Convention.
130. IPI to Johnston, IO, 6 February 1935, L/P&J/8/582, APAC BL.
131. C. W. Gwynne, Home GOI, to Peel, IO, 16 January 1933, L/P&J/12/92,
APAC BL. The Government of India had previously hoped to place the
issue of arms smuggling before the League of Nations.
132. C. M. Trivedi, GOI, to Undersec. of State for India, 2 March 1935,
133. Findlater Stewart to Sir Russell Scott, HO, 16 April 1935, L/P&J/8/582,
APAC BL.
134. R. Peel to Sir C. Kisch, Sir F. Stewart, 27 April 1935, L/P&J/8/582,
APAC BL.
135. R. Peel to Sir Denys Bray, GOI, 27 October 1937; and Bray to Sec. of
State for India, 16 November 1937. Article 13 of the convention stated
that “Manufacturers of fire-arms, other than smooth-bore sporting guns,
shall be required to mark each arm with a serial number or other distinc-
tive mark permitting it to be identified; both manufacturers and retailers
shall be obliged to keep a register of the names and addresses of purchas-
ers.” League of Nations, Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of
Terrorism, Geneva, 16 November 1937, L/P&J/8/583, APAC BL.
136. The Bengal Smuggling of Arms Bill, 1933, “Statement of Objects and
Reasons,” 22 December 1933, L/P&J/7/619, APAC BL.
137. The Bengal Smuggling of Arms Act, 1934, L/P&J/7/619, APAC BL.
138. The definition is from the 1923 Bengal (Goondas) Act.
139. Although official reports from the 1880s onwards expressed concern over
increased crime in industrializing areas such as the Asansol-Raniganj coal-
mining belt in Burdwan District, particularly among migrants from the
United Provinces and Bihar, the patterns of criminal activity in these dis-
tricts was neither clear nor consistent. While districts such as Howrah and
Burdwan showed a marked increase in violent crime, property crimes
actually decreased in Howrah and Hooghly districts. See Arun Mukherjee,
Crime and Public Disorder in Colonial Bengal 1861–1912 (Calcutta: K. P.
Bagchi, 1995), 45–50. For the heterogeneity of Calcutta’s “goondas,”
see Suranjan Das and Jayanta K. Ray, The Goondas: Towards a
Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1996).
140. Indigenous elites as well as colonial authorities had a role in the construc-
tion of the concept of “goondaism” and specifically the “goonda prob-
lem” in the Barabazar area of northern Calcutta following the First World
War. See Sugata Nandi, “Constructing the Criminal: Politics of the Social
Imaginary of the ‘Goonda’,” Social Scientist 38: 3–4 (2010), 37–54.
141. Lord Ronaldshay to Sir Edwin Montagu, 24 November 1921, Montagu
Papers, MSS Eur. C 523/32, APAC BL.
278 M. SILVESTRI
142. The Bengal (Goondas) Act, 1923, P&J No. 1611 of 1923,
143. Debraj Bhattacharya, “Kolkata ‘Underworld’ in the Early Twentieth
Century,” Economic and Political Weekly 39: 38 (September 18–24,
2004), 4279.
144. Sugata Nandi, “Inventing Extraordinary Criminality: A Study of the
Calcutta Goondas Act,” in Shaunnagh Dorsett and John McLaren, eds.,
Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies
(London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 92–106 (quotation on 103).
Nandi notes how the “Criminal Biography” in each externed goonda’s
police file outlined a common three-part transformation into “a criminal
whom ordinary law failed to subdue.” Nandi, “Inventing Extraordinary
Criminality,” 97.
145. Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London and
146. See Chap. 2.
147. Extract from an Abstract of the Proceedings of the Meeting of the Bengal
Legislative Council, 15 February 1934, L/P&J/7/619, APAC BL.
148. “Report under Section 6(4) of the Bengal Smuggling of Arms Act 1934,
in connection with the case of Henry Obed,” 9 April 1935,
Modern Asian Studies 47: 6 (2013), 1782–1811 (quotation on 1797).
CHAPTER 7
Intelligence Expertise and Imperial Threats:

Bengal Intelligence Officers in North
America, Europe, and Asia
In October 1937, the imperial press held out high hopes for the mission
of a former Indian Police officer in the Mandate colony of Palestine. The
press heaped praise upon former Calcutta Police Commissioner Charles
Tegart, who was departing for Palestine with a mission to reorganize the
police in response to the Arab Revolt. Tegart was “the most daring and
courageous policeman in the world today,” according to the Sunday
Express, while the Belfast Telegraph called the Anglo-Irish officer “a skilled
organizer” and a “brilliant detective and linguist.”1 The North China
Herald of Shanghai, always an imperially-minded newspaper, referred to
him as “probably the most famous of Indian Police Officers of the recent
past” and “an implacable and imperturbable enemy of anarchical terror-
ists.”2 Several papers mentioned Tegart’s legendary skill at disguise. “Sir
Charles lived up in real life to Kipling’s famous police hero,” was the ver-
dict of the Nottingham Guardian. Most spectacularly, Empire News in a
banner front page headline described him as “Britain’s New Lawrence of
Arabia.” “Not unlike Lawrence of Arabia in appearance,” wrote Leonard
O. Mosley, “he is as ingenious as Lawrence in disguising himself, and as
fluent in all Indian and Arab dialects.”3 The comparison to Lawrence was
repeated in the Australian press as well.4
The implausible claims for Tegart’s skills at language and disguise, and
in particular the invocation of Kipling and Lawrence, stand as examples of
the enduring power of imperial popular culture in the interwar era.5 Yet

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_7
280 M. SILVESTRI
the imperial myth-making surrounding Tegart’s skill as a dashing secret

agent obscured the more mundane reality of police careers forged across
the Empire. By 1936, Tegart was one of a number of imperial experts on
policing, counter-terrorism, and counter-insurgency. For the past two
decades, his career had alternated between police and intelligence work in
India and the United Kingdom. The Palestine Royal Commission had
already identified the anticolonial violence of the Arab Revolt as parallel-
ing that of other interwar insurgencies: “As in Ireland in the worst days
after the War or in Bengal, intimidation at the point of a revolver has
become a not infrequent feature of Arab politics.”6
The previous two chapters have explored the way that imperial intelli-
gence agencies within and outside India attempted to counter the threats
posed by the international activism of Bengali revolutionaries. Collectively,
the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch (IB), the Intelligence Bureau of the
Government of India (GOI), and Indian Political Intelligence (IPI)
sought—not always without conflict and rivalry—to share information
and bolster intelligence in order to neutralize revolutionaries’ networks of
contacts and alliances with other anticolonial activists and of arms smug-
gling. Yet imperial intelligence—and, more broadly, imperial networks—
were matters of individuals as well as institutions.7 This chapter explores
how police officers and other colonial officials involved with the campaign
against the Bengal revolutionaries attempted to deploy their experience
elsewhere in the British Empire and beyond its borders. Their experience
in colonial intelligence and counter-insurgency was utilized against Indian
revolutionaries and against other anticolonial insurgents. As this expertise
was deployed in different colonial and global contexts, the “lessons” of
the campaign against Bengali terrorism were not simply transferred, but
adapted. An analysis of this process reveals the successes but also the limi-
tations of efforts to apply elsewhere intelligence expertise gained against
the Bengal revolutionaries.
These efforts to utilize this intelligence and counter-insurgency experi-
ence in different imperial and global contexts illustrate how issues of colo-
nial governance within the British Empire did not simply emanate from
the imperial center, nor were they confined within a single colony. Rather,
as Jill Bender observes, “methods of colonial rule were deployed neither
in one location nor by one individual, and the flows of information from
one colony to another played a crucial role in shaping imperial practice.”8
The movement of officers with expertise in the policing of the Bengali
7 INTELLIGENCE EXPERTISE AND IMPERIAL THREATS: BENGAL… 281
revolutionaries illustrates these cross-colonial connections, and more gen-

erally, the complexity of imperial networks.
The lives of imperial intelligence officers and their efforts to thwart the
plans of Bengali revolutionaries across the globe and apply their expertise
in other colonial contexts illustrate what David Lambert and Alan Lester
have referred to as the “complex spatiality” of empire.9 While most of the
officers discussed here spent time in London, the application of their
experience to empire was not simply an issue of the connections between
metropole and colonies. Rather, the interactions of empire “were compo-
nents of much more extensive networks connecting multiple colonial and
metropolitan, as well as extra-imperial, sites.”10 Revolutionary activity
and imperial policing thus spilled out a single Indian province across the
globe, and the efforts to deploy policing and intelligence expertise from
Bengal illustrate the “the complex and irregular systems of connection”
of imperial networks.11
These intelligence officers forged imperial careers which extended across
multiple sites within the British Empire, including the metropole, and at
times to locales beyond the empire’s borders. These imperial intelligence
officers were a diverse group—English, Irish, and Eurasian—and their
cross-colonial careers were carried out for various reasons: opportunity and
advancement, money, health, and personal safety, as well as a conviction to
uphold the British Empire. While their engagement with the colonies to
which they traveled was often not as deep as that of those who made careers
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as colonial governors and
proconsuls, their “imperial careering” nonetheless helps to illustrate how
imperial ideas of fighting terrorism and insurgency were adapted and trans-
ferred across “trans-imperial spaces,” and how networks of knowledge and
power “connected the multiple sites of the empire to each other, to the
imperial metropole and to extra-imperial spaces beyond.”12 Lastly, an
examination of this issue reveals the nature of identities across the “Empire
World.”13 The identities of these imperial intelligence officers were not
something which they simply carried with them to the empire, but were
reshaped by their experiences there.14 William Hopkinson, a Eurasian
policeman, reinvented himself as a white Briton in western Canada. Robert
Nathan, a Cambridge-educated former member of the Indian Civil Service,
was the model of an urbane Englishman in New York City. And Charles
Tegart cultivated a reputation not only as an imperial intelligence officer
but also as a “wild Irishman” whose background gave him insights into the
activities of anticolonial revolutionaries.
282 M. SILVESTRI
1 Policing the Empire, Policing the Metropolis

The Indian Police were based upon a combination of metropolitan police
models, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scotland
Yard was an important resource for policing techniques and technologies.
In 1891, the Bombay Police established a small detective branch which
had utilized “the system of criminal identification which is practised in the
CID at Scotland Yard,” which depended mainly on the recording and
identification of bodily marks.15 The Inspector General hoped such a sys-
tem would be widely applicable across colonial India. While on leave as an
Assistant Superintendent in the Bombay Police in 1902, John Wallinger,
later the first head of IPI, requested to be attached to Scotland Yard for
three months.16 At the turn of the twentieth century, the Metropolitan
Police, not the Indian Police, were regarded as the elite service. Indian
officers went for training in London, not the other way around.17
By the late nineteenth century, however, the relationship of policing in
the metropole and colonies was not simply an issue of colonial emulation
of precedents from the United Kingdom. The appointment of individuals
with either colonial policing or military backgrounds (the latter often with
considerable imperial experience) to senior positions within the
Metropolitan Police became a common occurrence. This was particularly
pronounced within the realm of political intelligence work of the Special
Branch, directed primarily against the Fenians and Irish revolutionary
activity. James Monro, former ICS office and Inspector General of the
Bengal Police, was appointed Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police in charge of the CID in 1884, head of the Special Branch in 1887,
and from 1888 to 1890 he served as Chief Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police. Sir William Spencer Harcourt, the Liberal Home
Secretary, wrote to Queen Victoria that Monro was qualified to deal with
intelligence work related to Fenian activity in Britain on the basis of his
experience in India, where the police “had to deal largely with secret
societies.”18
Thus, in Bernard Porter’s words, in terms of policing, particularly polit-
ical intelligence and surveillance work, “the Empire was striking back” by
the last two decades of the nineteenth century.19 Yet the traffic in policing
technologies, expertise and personnel were not simply a one-way traffic of
the export of Metropolitan models to the colonies or the import of colo-
nial models to Britain but rather a process of “cross-fertilization” in which
policing models, technologies, and personnel were shared between
Metropole and empire.20 A prominent illustration of this “cross-

fertilization” is the imperial career of Sir Edward Henry, an ICS officer
who served as both Inspector General of the Bengal Police and
Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police. Henry is best known
for the establishment of the system of fingerprinting as a form of criminal
identification.21 This research was pioneered in colonial India, where
Henry had previously utilized an anthropometric system of criminal iden-
tification which had been developed in France. Prior to taking up the posi-
tion of Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1901, he
spent ten months in South Africa during the latter part of the Anglo-Boer
War, where not only implemented new systems of identification, but
assumed the task of “building the entire police force from scratch” in the
Transvaal.22 After assuming the Commissionership of the Metropolitan
Police, an office he held from 1903–1918, he continued to be regularly
consulted regarding imperial police matters. In October 1911, Henry
accompanied King George V to India as his personal bodyguard, and fol-
lowing the assassination attempt on Lord Hardinge in the following year,
the India Office shared confidential memos on the bombing and con-
sulted with Henry on security arrangements for Viceregal processions in
New Delhi.23
There is one additional facet to the imperial circulation of police offi-
cers in the early twentieth century. Civil and military officers with colonial
experience—including a number of Indian Police veterans—featured
prominently in the early history of British intelligence services, MI5, and
the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6.24 In 1917, for example, eight of
the twenty-eight officers of MI5’s G Branch, which handled investiga-
tions, had experience in the Indian Police, military or Indian Civil Service.25
MI5’s D-Branch, established in 1915 to collect and analyze information
about German efforts at subversion within the British Empire, also had a
strong colonial presence among its personnel. An MI5 history observed
that “several of its officers were selected as having already had experience
in India and the Colonies and were thus cognisant of local conditions and
the peculiarities of race and nomenclature.”26 Within SIS, Colonel
Valentine Vivian (known by his initials “V.V.”), a veteran of the Indian
Police, the Indian Army and IPI, served until after the Second World War,
rising to the rank of Deputy Chief. As Keith Jeffery observed, the small
size of the early SIS organization accentuated “the importance of indi-
viduals, and their personalities.” The same was true of MI5, and this meant
284 M. SILVESTRI
that the influence of officers with imperial backgrounds was particularly

pronounced.27
2 Bengali Revolutionaries and Scotland Yard

The policing of revolutionary terrorism in Bengal illustrates the complex
interactions between police personnel across the empire. There was no
specific pattern to the movement of police officers from Bengal, as officers
of various ranks and various experience with revolutionary activity traveled
to London and locales within the empire. One initial reaction of colonial
authorities in Bengal to the rise of the revolutionary movement was to
request the assistance of Scotland Yard. At a time when many colonial
officials believed that revolutionaries were fundamentally inspired by and
perhaps directed by European revolutionaries and anarchists, detective
assistance from London seemed in 1908 to be the answer to the prayers of
the beleaguered police force of the province of Eastern Bengal and
Assam.28 The Director of Criminal Intelligence (DCI), C. J. Stevenson-
Moore, however, informed the provincial government that their proposal
to import a British detective to train Indian officers would cost much and
achieve little. Such a detective “would come to the country completely
ignorant of the language and the peoples” and “would not be in a position
to give any advice or help for many years.” Stevenson-Moore cast doubt
on the possibility of transferring ideas on police surveillance from one part
of the empire to the other. “There are very few principles generally appli-
cable to detective work, and it is doubtful whether our detectives have
much to learn regarding them.”29
In spite of the DCI’s dismissive reply, which Chief Secretary P. C. Lyons
described as “amateurish” and unhelpful, the Inspector General, Henry
LeMesurier stressed the pressing need for the province’s police to acquire
a knowledge of European revolutionary movements. LeMesurier praised
his Indian detectives but noted that none of them “know anything of the
ways, habits and appearances of Foreign European criminals, especially
when they are not English—and all the knowledge they have of continen-
tal anarchism, they must pick up from the anarchist’s notes.” The same
was true, he contended, of his British officers, whose entire professional
careers had been immersed in the study of colonial criminality rather than
European revolutionaries:
If it be said their European officers should do the work or should train and
teach the Indians, the answer is where are they to come by that knowledge?
It is hardly too much to say that any one of our Police officers came out to
India before he was twenty … hardly any had ever visited the Continent
before, I doubt whether any have even spent a furlough ‘abroad’ since they
came out. I gladly admit that several have a good command of foreign lan-
guages but I doubt whether many are interested in the politics or under-
stand the history of the European Revolutions since the Commune of 1870,
the ramifications of the International or the mental condition of Nihilists
and Anarchists.30
The solution, LeMesurier wrote, was to strengthen the link between the
Indian and Metropolitan Police, which would enable Eastern Bengal and
Assam to come to grips with what he described as a revolutionary move-
ment inspired by European revolutionaries. LeMesurier argued for the
need for a London CID officer on two grounds: Bengal revolutionaries
were studying the tactics and ideology of European revolutionaries, and
were also receiving direct assistance from an assortment of agents and fel-
low travelers in London.
The Inspector General complained of a barrage of nationalist “propa-
ganda from Vancouver and the publication of ‘Free Hindoostan’ and the
‘India’ houses in London,” as well as American publications on “the Irish
Fenians and Clan na Gael.” Intelligence indicated that members of many
of the above-named groups were in touch with the Bengal revolutionaries,
while reports from Calcutta informed him that a Russian thief named
Krondrusky [sic] “was in league with some of these people” and that a
woman he had robbed in a train “was probably a Russian nihilist visiting
the Manicktolla gang” who had previously met some of the Bengalis in
Paris. Within Eastern Bengal, police abstracts showed “a number of non-
descript foreigners strolling about the country—all on demonstrably
bogus errands but on whom we can fix no certain tally.” While admitting
that these men were highly unlikely to be agents of a foreign power,
LeMesurier contended they were either “continental ‘comrades’ of the
revolutionists, or sellers of weapons or explosives or common thieves and
blackmailers.”
He appealed to Edward Henry to lend
one of the officers of his CID who are more accustomed to deal with politi-
cal crime—I mean the men who work under the Assistant Commissioner in
London and receive the reports of the agents employed on the surveillance
286 M. SILVESTRI
of anarchists in Paris and Spain, and the Clan-na-Gael in the U.S., and pos-
sibly socialistic Nihilists in Germany and Russia.31
While Indian authorities continued to make periodic pleas for detective

assistance from London in the investigation of revolutionary activity, the
attitudes of police authorities in Bengal regarding their relationship with
Scotland Yard underwent a shift over the following decade.32 As the Bengal
Police developed their own extensive intelligence structure and increasing
confidence in their ability to understand and anticipate the actions of the
revolutionaries, they came to view police and intelligence agencies in the
United Kingdom as resources to supplement their archive on “Bengali
terrorism,” not to teach them rudimentary skills of police detective work.
Following the Great War, the Government of Bengal boasted that their
police were training in the most up to date methods of Scotland Yard.33
One of these men was a registrar attached to Bengal Police Intelligence
Branch named J. C. Curzen, who in 1919 sought to obtain “a working
knowledge particularly of the card indexing and filing systems in vogue at
Scotland Yard, and generally of matters affecting office organisation.” This
seemingly mundane task had important implications for the Intelligence
Branch’s ability to keep track of the vast intelligence archive it had com-
piled over the previous decade, and the Government of Bengal hoped that
Scotland Yard’s more comprehensive system might assist with that task.
Curzen spent part of his yearlong leave in the United Kingdom exploring
Scotland Yard’s record-keeping system; his “thorough knowledge of the
Indian office systems,” the Government of Bengal hoped, would “enable
him readily to assimilate variations in procedure.”34
The growth of the Indian revolutionary movement overseas and its
connections to Bengal during and after the Great War prompted the
Bengal Police to make efforts to enhance their officers’ understanding of
the transnational dimensions of Indian nationalism and improve their abil-
ity to detect and monitor revolutionary suspects. The Bengal IB was well
aware of the international ramifications of the Bengal revolutionaries dur-
ing the Great War, notably the Indo-German Conspiracy, and the
Intelligence Branch’s library featured numerous publications from the
Intelligence Bureau on this subject.35 The Russian Revolution renewed
fears of foreign influence on the revolutionary movement, however, and
the IB once again turned to police and intelligence agencies in Britain to
bolster their capacity to deal with the growth of Communist ideology. Of
particular concern to colonial authorities in Bengal were Bolshevik agents,
racially stereotyped as typically having “Semitic features.” As Suchetana

Chattopadhyay observes, “the ceaseless arrival and departure of casual
visitors of European origin through the Calcutta port, especially those
matching certain racialized descriptions, were a source of official unease.”36
In 1919, the Government of Bengal requested that a Calcutta Police
inspector named Tyson, who had for the previous six years been involved
with the investigation of foreigners living in or visiting Calcutta, be allowed
to study at Scotland Yard “in order that he may be given an insight into
the methods employed in England in dealing with foreigners and contre
espionage work generally.” The Government of Bengal regarded Tyson’s
work as crucial to monitoring the activities of Calcutta’s mobile and transi-
tory European population; J. H. Kerr noted that such work had been
important during the Great War, and was likely to remain so, and hoped
that Tyson would be able to make himself “familiar with the history and
antecedents of continental characters who may visit India.”37 Scotland
Yard arranged for Tyson to study for three months there under an
Inspector, where he acquired much “valuable knowledge.”38
While Tyson’s death shortly after his return to India prevented him
from sharing much of the intelligence about Bolshevism which he had
gleaned, another more senior intelligence officer was able to pursue an
even more in-depth analysis of British intelligence on communist revolu-
tionaries.39 In 1920, F. W. Kidd, the Deputy Commissioner of the Calcutta
Police Special Branch, requested to study intelligence material on
Bolshevism during his time on leave in London, an application which the
Government of Bengal readily endorsed:
He is very anxious, while he is at home, to study at his own expense,

Bolshevism in its application to India and the East. We consider that any-
thing he can learn on this subject and in regard to the methods of dealing
with Bolshevism or counteracting it, will be of considerable use to
Government when Mr. Kydd [sic] returns.40
Kidd examined India Office files on the subject during his time in London,
which one India Office official described as “practically all the information
as to Bolshevism that has been obtained,” and likely met with intelligence
officers as well.41 Kidd was allowed access to “certain papers” (presumably
from MI5, Scotland Yard, or SIS) and was able to type out notes for his
own use. Kidd returned to Bengal with typescript notes on subjects such
as the political views of Indian students at British universities and Italian
288 M. SILVESTRI
government efforts to support anticolonial movements, and shared these

with the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch. Kidd noted how the political
views of Indian students at Edinburgh University were “more revolution-
ary than Bolshevik” due to the influence of two Bengali students, Phanidra
Acharji Chaudhury of Mymensingh and a second student identified only
as “Mitter.” Two Italian-government-sponsored organizations, the Amici
Dell’India and the Colonial Institute, had been established to assist Indian,
Persian, Egyptian, and Turkish revolutionaries; and Kidd noted that rep-
resentatives of the latter hoped for enlist the support of the Italian consul-
ate in Calcutta.42 Overall, Kidd’s experience with the India Office’s
intelligence archive conveys the impression of a professional seeking to
hone his craft. Indeed, by the time Kidd pored over intelligence files in
London, officers involved in the campaign against the Bengali revolution-
aries had already begun to apply their experience elsewhere in the empire.
3 Bengal, Police, and Imperial Intelligence

in North America I
Colonial officers with experience policing the revolutionary movement in

Bengal played a prominent role in British efforts to counter the Indian
revolutionary group known as Ghadar. Established in 1913 among Indian
migrants, chiefly Punjabi Sikhs, and Indian students on the west coast of
North America, the Ghadar Party sought to achieve Indian independence
through armed revolution. The first posting of a member of the police
forces in Bengal as an imperial intelligence agent, however, arose almost
accidentally. When Canadian authorities began carrying out surveillance
on Indians on the west coast at the beginning of 1909, they selected a
Calcutta Police inspector named William Hopkinson, who had been work-
ing as an immigration inspector while on leave. Hopkinson’s prominent
role in imperial intelligence on the west coast has been well discussed by
Richard J. Popplewell.43 The focus here is on Hopkinson’s connection to
Bengal and his experiences with revolutionaries there as well as else-
where in India.
Hopkinson began his police career as an inspector in the Punjab Police,
and subsequently served for six years in the Calcutta Police from 1901 to
1907. Hopkinson’s tenure in the Calcutta Police coincided with the
Swadeshi movement and the beginnings of the revolutionary movement
in Bengal, and he claimed knowledge of both Indian revolutionary
ationalism and the colonial government’s anti-revolutionary campaign.44

n
Although much of Hopkinson’s work as an immigration officer and intel-
ligence officer in Canada concerned Punjabi Sikhs who made up the
majority of the South Asian population on the West Coast, the subjects of
his surveillance efforts included a number of Bengalis associated with the
revolutionary movement. He noted the formation of an organization
known as the “Anushilan Samiti” “alleged to be affiliated with other secret
bodies in the cities of Dacca and Faridpore, Bengal,” and warned police of
the danger of a possible attack on former Governor of Bengal Andrew
Fraser when he was lecturing in Vancouver.45 The Governor of British
Honduras, E. J. E. Swain noted that the “Brahmin section” [sic] in British
Columbia merited careful surveillance, as “there is presumptive evidence
that they have a close connection with the agitation in Bengal.” Swain
added that “I do not think that a better man than Mr. Hopkinson, of the
Calcutta Police, could be found for this work,” and suggested that “the
Government of India be asked to place him in official communication with
the head of the Calcutta Police in order to further his work.”46
While Hopkinson carried out some surveillance himself, donning a tur-
ban to listen to discussions in the Sikh temple in Vancouver and speeches
by the Indian radical Har Dayal in California, he was too well known to
the local Sikh community and lacked the fluency in Punjabi to carry off a
convincing disguise.47 He relied instead on the same strategy used in colo-
nial India: networks of informers. Hopkinson achieved considerable suc-
cess in establishing his own network of Indian informants in western
Canada. In contrast to intelligence officers in India, this necessitated him
dealing directly with Indian sources of information, rather than through
the intermediary of Indian police officers.48 While Hopkinson was frus-
trated by his inability to establish a similar network of informants in the
United States, which he attributed to the lack of “educated” Hindus “in
whom I can place any reliance,” he became, in the words of Maia Ramnath,
“the Ghadarites’ nemesis.”49
Along with monthly or twice-monthly reports which he provided the
Canadian Minister of the Interior, which were forwarded to the Colonial
Office and subsequently to the India Office, Hopkinson also supplied cop-
ies of radical publications, lists of Indians arriving at US ports, and reports
not only on their activities on the west coast of North America, but infor-
mation about Indians who were returning to India, and might be of con-
cern to police authorities.50 One of the marked successes of Hopkinson’s
career as an imperial intelligence officer was his close coordination with
290 M. SILVESTRI
US immigration authorities. The intelligence exchanges between

Hopkinson and US immigrations officials helped to shape the exclusion-
ary US immigration policy toward South Asians which emerged during
the First World War.51 Hopkinson met with US immigration officers to
supplement his information on Indian radicals in the United States, and
also advised US officers on Indian migrants who might have links to anti-
colonial politics. He also supplied information for US authorities to build
deportation cases against anticolonial activists Har Dayal, one of the
founders of the Ghadar Party, and the Bengali revolutionary and journalist
Taraknath Das.
In common with contemporary police colleagues in Bengal, Hopkinson
at times couched his intelligence analyses in terms of negative colonial
stereotypes of Indians; in his reports Indian migrants to western North
America were not simply politically subversive but untrustworthy, dirty,
and morally degraded.52 In this regard, Hopkinson also drew on extensive
materials from the Asiatic Exclusion League, the labor-backed organiza-
tion which sought to end Asian immigration to the US Pacific Coast. In
October 1911, for example, the League supplied him with newspaper clip-
pings with which he was able to report on the public meetings of an orga-
nization in Berkeley called the “Friends of Hindoostan,” headed by
Taraknath Das.53 Hopkinson’s involvement with the racist and xenopho-
bic Asiatic Exclusion League became prominent enough that the India
Office sought to caution him on potential association with the “labour
riff-raff” of the League.54
In spite of his association with the racially-exclusionist League,
Hopkinson’s own ancestry was likely Eurasian rather than British.
Although he subsequently stated that he was born in Yorkshire, and came
to India as a young child, his birth certificate shows that he was born in
Allahabad, India, the son of William and Agnes Hopkinson, both of whom
were themselves born in India. Although Indians on the West Coast of
North America believed that Hopkinson was sent by the Government of
India, he seems to have come to Canada in 1907 for purely personal rea-
sons. Hopkinson may have wished to leave Calcutta following the death of
his wife; he certainly had reached the ceiling for his advancement within
the Calcutta Police. Although Eurasians continued to be employed in the
subordinate ranks of the police, by the 1900s, promotion from the rank of
inspector to superintendent was extremely unlikely for a European, let
alone Eurasian, as superior officers were selected on the basis of competi-
tive exams modeled after those of the Indian Civil Service.55 Hugh J. M.
Johnston concludes that “Hopkinson was of mixed ancestry, and his racial
background was an inescapable fact of his history.”56
Whether a Eurasian or a “domiciled European” (a white person born in
India rather than Britain) Hopkinson’s “imperial careering” seems to have
been an effort to escape from the discrimination and disabilities faced by
both Eurasians and Indian-born Europeans alike in the post-Mutiny era.57
In Canada, Hopkinson reinvented himself as a white Briton; he married an
English woman, Nellie Frye, originally from London, and the two settled
in Grandview, an expanding middle-class area of Vancouver. Hopkinson
became a member of the Orange Order and secured a position first as an
immigration inspector and in 1911 as a Dominion Police Officer. Although
some historians have questioned Hopkinson’s categorization as a Eurasian,
his colleagues clearly regarded him as someone of mixed British-Indian
ancestry based on his accent, complexion, and knowledge of Indian lan-
guages. (He was fluent in Hindustani and competent in Punjabi.)
In 1913, Hopkinson’s intelligence mission in North America received
the formal support of the Government of India, as he received £60
annual retainer and an equal amount to be spent in acquiring informa-
tion. His reports were from this point sent directly to Wallinger and
Indian Political Intelligence, who in turn forwarded them to the DCI, to
whom Hopkinson was already sending his secret communications.58 The
Eurasian former Calcutta Police inspector thus became an important fig-
ure in the emerging global intelligence network against Indian revolu-
tionaries. William C. Hopkinson’s career as an imperial intelligence
officer and his life were abruptly ended just a year later, however.
Nationalist politics and Hopkinson’s network of informers had divided
the Sikh community in Vancouver. Following the murder of the presi-
dent of the local Sikh temple by Hopkinson’s leading informant, Bela
Singh Jian, the immigration inspector was in turn fatally shot while wait-
ing to testify at his trial on 21 October 1914.59
4 Bengal, Police, and Imperial Intelligence

in North America II
While Hopkinson at the time of his death was the lone intelligence officer
monitoring Indian revolutionary activity on the west coast, during the
Great War the British intelligence presence in North American expanded
dramatically. Indian Police and Indian Civil Service officers from Bengal
292 M. SILVESTRI
played a prominent role in this process. The two officers who helped shape
wartime investigations into the Ghadar Party were both important figures
in colonial intelligence work against the Bengali revolutionaries: Indian
Civil Service officer Robert Nathan and Indian Police officer
Godfrey Denham.
Although the Nathan family had no prior tradition of imperial service,
Robert Nathan, along with five of his six brothers, established careers in
diverse parts of the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries. One served in the Indian Public Works Department, three
others attended the Royal Military Academy, and one half-brother served
as attorney-general of Trinidad. The most well-known of the Nathan sib-
lings in imperial service was Matthew Nathan, who served in succession as
governor of the Gold Coast, Hong Kong, and Natal and later as
Undersecretary of State for Ireland at the time of the Easter Rising.60
Robert Nathan matriculated at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, and
entered the ICS in 1888. He occupied a number of positions in the
Government of India, including a time as private secretary to the Viceroy,
Lord Curzon, in 1905. Beginning in 1907 he held a series of appoint-
ments in Eastern Bengal and Assam. In 1907, he was appointed
Commissioner of Dacca Division and from 1910 served as Officiating
Secretary. During the course of his career, he authored a number of schol-
arly studies of colonial India; he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta
University in 1914 but was unable to take up the appointment due to ill-
health, and had to retire from the ICS in the following year.61
Thus, in many ways Nathan’s career trajectory was that of a typical
Oxbridge-educated late Victorian member of the British-Indian elite. Yet
his appointment in Eastern Bengal and Assam also marked the beginning
of a second career in imperial intelligence which would take Nathan from
India to Europe to America. Nathan’s responsibilities in Dacca were
closely linked to the suppression of both the anti-Partition Swadeshi cam-
paign, and the Dacca Anushilan Samiti, the major revolutionary organiza-
tion in eastern Bengal. Indeed, ICS officers such as Nathan rather than the
police were the most important force in the early investigations into the
revolutionary party in Eastern Bengal and Assam. While both Bengal and
Eastern Bengal and Assam struggled to adapt their police forces to the
new political movements developing before the First World War, the prob-
lem was particularly acute in the latter. A significant part of Nathan’s
duties involved the collection and analysis of intelligence against the
Swadeshi and revolutionary movements, and he authored reports on
v arious subjects relating to the revolutionary movement, including analy-

ses of cases of dacoity and history sheets of revolutionary sympathizers and
suspects.62
In 1907, Nathan warned that the Swadeshi movement was testing the
loyalties of Hindu district magistrates and police officers who came from
the same “classes and families” as nationalists, and stressed the need for an
influx of European officers to shore up the colonial presence throughout
the province. “A European officer in the interior,” Nathan wrote, express-
ing a typical Raj admiration for the abilities of its British officers, “can do
a great deal towards restoring good feeling and towards counteracting the
machinations of the irreconcilable agitators. He can also be relied on to
give early intimations of trouble and to take action to suppress it before it
becomes unmanageable.”63 He urged the provincial government to
request the DCI to send one of his officers to Eastern Bengal to aid with
intelligence work. To counter the “secret meetings and other secret
means” of nationalists, he argued, “secret service police are needed.”64
Nathan worked closely with his subordinate, District Magistrate H. L.
Salkeld, who authored a multi-volume report on the Dacca Anushila
Samiti.65 Immediately after assuming the position of governor of the prov-
ince, Charles Bayley had a series of long conversations with Nathan and
Salkeld, in which the two provided him with information about the activi-
ties of the Dacca Anushilan Samiti and the possibility of prosecuting its
leader Pulin Behari Das, who was at the time being held without bail on
the charge of kidnapping.66 Nathan was a central figure in efforts to sup-
press the Samiti’s activities, and the proscription of the organization and
the deportation of Pulin Behari Das and its other leaders in 1908.
Following his retirement from the ICS, Nathan served as an interpreter
for Indian troops on the Western Front, and was subsequently placed on
“special duty” for the War Office. Nathan’s work with Indian troops
almost certainly involved intelligence work of some type, presumably
through Indian Political Intelligence.67 Nathan moved to MI5 in 1915,
and worked in its A2 Section which dealt with suspected cases of
“Espionage, Sedition and Treachery” in Britain beyond metropolitan
London.68 He became MI5 Director Vernon Kell’s “main Indian expert”
and served along with Kell on the wartime interdepartmental committee
on Indian revolutionary activity.69
In the following year, Nathan arrived in Vancouver, Canada, as the rep-
resentative of the India Office and by the end of the year had relocated to
New York. During the Great War, he was one of the most important
294 M. SILVESTRI
embers of Sir William Wiseman’s SIS organization in North America,

m
and focused on the surveillance of Indian, and, increasingly, Irish revolu-
tionaries in the United States and Canada.70 Nathan’s social background,
particularly his Cambridge education (which likely aided in the bond he
formed with Wiseman, a baronet who had earned a boxing Blue at
Cambridge) and his contacts with the highest levels of Indian colonial
administration, was an important factor in his rise in SIS.71 Yet Nathan’s
experience with the revolutionary movement in Bengal was undoubtedly
a significant factor in his entrée into intelligence work in North America,
where he arrived not just as an old India hand, but as someone who had
earned, in the historian Richard Spence’s words, “a reputation as a plot
smasher in Bengal.”72
Although historians have reconstructed some of the early activities of
the SIS in the United States, Nathan was very discreet about his wartime
espionage activities and other facets of his intelligence work.73 In part this
may have been because of the reputation he had earned for his work
against the Bengal revolutionary movement. Fellow intelligence officer
Norman Thwaites recalled the importance of Nathan preserving “a strict
incognito, not only for his own sake, but for the sake of preserving his
usefulness. He had a great reputation in India, and had it been known to
the seditionists that he was working on the case our quarry would have
scuttled to cover.”74 A US Justice Department official wrote in 1920 that
“No one seems to have been able to learn his true status or mission. He
appeared, however, to be an experienced diplomat, highly educated, a
world traveler, and holding a rather important place with the British
Government.”75
Networks of informants formed one of the most important elements in
SIS’s US organization during and after the Great War, and one of Nathan’s
main responsibilities was the handling of agents and informers who pro-
vided information on anticolonial and later Bolshevik movements.76
According to the financial records of Wiseman’s intelligence officer in
New York City, officially designated M.I.1.c, Indian intelligence work (for
which the office was reimbursed by the India Office), constituted about
ten percent of the work of British intelligence officers there during the
latter half of the war. Another $1000 was paid for “Western Organization
Expenses,” which dealt in large part with Indian anticolonial activity on
the West Coast. One of Nathan’s assistants in New York, James Alexander
Duff, supervised the work of two regular agents, “M,” who was paid $75
per month, and “K,” who received $100.77 Following Nathan’s return to
London in 1918, two other officers were subsequently delegated to inter-

view what Wiseman’s assistant, the former Mexican diplomat Manuel Del
Campo, referred to as “N’s [Nathan’s] dusky friends.”78
Nathan also played an important role in another of British intelligence’s
key functions in the United States in this period: collaboration with US
intelligence regarding anticolonial and radical activity. Anglo-American
intelligence collaboration on Indian radical activity, which had already
begun with William Hopkinson’s cooperation with US immigration offi-
cials, intensified during the Great War, as the Ghadar Party collaborated
with German government representatives to import arms into India.
Bengal revolutionaries, notably Rash Behari Bose in Japan and Jugantar
Party leader Jatin Mukherjee in Bengal, were integral parts of these plans
to provide arms via Southeast Asia in support of an Indian insurrection.
Following US entry into the war in 1917, a total of thirty-five Indian sub-
jects and German and US citizens were brought to trial for the violation
of US neutrality laws in what became known as the “Hindu Conspiracy
Case.” British officials played an important role in the case, supplying
intelligence, interrogating suspects and potential witnesses and even
guarding suspected revolutionaries. Nathan and several other former colo-
nial officials from Bengal played an important role in US efforts to elimi-
nate Indo-German revolutionary collaboration.
While European and North American police often considered one of
their prime difficulties in anticolonial surveillance to be the “reading” of
“inscrutable” natives, the presence of intelligence officers with colonial
experience such as Hopkinson, Nathan, and others held out the promise
of making the “inscrutable” ways of Indians legible.79 British intelligence
officer Norman Thwaites, who worked closely with police in New York
City, recalled that Nathan “worked hard at knitting up the fragments of
information which came to us from all parts of the world.”80 When German
agent Dr. Chandra K. Chakravarty was arrested in Manhattan and was
cross examined by Inspector Thomas Tunney of the New York City Police,
Nathan passed notes to Tunney which indicated “the line of enquiry to
take.” Thwaites recalled that Nathan demonstrated to Chakravarty that
the police already had a “considerable knowledge” of his actions. Nathan
passed on quotations from intercepted letters and “occasionally a few
words of Hindustani” for Tunney to use in his interrogation, which
“shook” the doctor and gave the impression that fellow conspirators had
betrayed him.81
296 M. SILVESTRI
According to Wiseman, Nathan was the first British official to grasp

fully the scope of Indo-German wartime collaboration. After reviewing
papers seized in a police raid on Chakravarty’s home, Nathan found “that
they disclose such an interesting connection with the Germans that … the
case may become much wider and involve the whole question of plots
against the Indian Government in the United States.” Wiseman in turn
considered the matter “sufficiently important” that he immediately dis-
patched Nathan to Washington to meet with British ambassador Cecil
Spring-Rice, and ask him “to take up the matter with the State Department
to see that the case is energetically handled and put Nathan in touch with
whomever will prosecute for the United States.”82
Nathan was assisted by another MI5 officer with experience of the rev-
olutionary movement in Bengal, former ICS officer and Political Secretary
to the Government of Bengal Alexander Marr, who was deputed to the
United States in 1917.83 Another of Nathan’s most important associates in
investigating the Ghadar Party and assisting the US Attorney General’s
office with the prosecution of India revolutionaries was Indian Police
superintendent Godfrey Denham. Like Nathan, Denham had played a
prominent role in the initial investigations into the Bengali revolutionary
movement. Denham had entered the Indian Police in 1902, and as an
Assistant Superintendent had served under the “Special Order” in charge
of the Bengal Police CID’s political work. His intellectual abilities were
well matched to the tasks he performed, which involved supervising the
information compiled on the revolutionaries. Denham was reputed to
have a photographic memory, and “could without apparent effort repeat
page after page of [the railway timetable] Bradshaw verbatim and who
performed remarkable mnemonic feats in his subsequent career, remem-
bering in detail the history of hundreds of cases.”84 During one early con-
spiracy trial of revolutionaries, Denham prepared a detailed chart for the
prosecution illustrating “how the different branches of the Bengal con-
spiracy were connected one with another and how the whole were con-
nected with Baroda and the Mahratta Country.” The Intelligence Branch
had the chart printed for the reference of police officers in throughout the
province.85
Denham played an important role in two of the early revolutionary
conspiracy cases, and helped to shape the ethos of the early Intelligence
Branch as a new institution of policing in colonial Bengal.86 He led a raid
in 1908 which led to the arrest of fifteen of those accused in what became
the first major conspiracy trial of the Bengal revolutionaries, the Alipore
Bomb Trial. During the trial in 1910 he was a leading advisor to the pros-
ecution.87 In the following year, Denham was called upon to investigate a
complex case in which revolutionaries in the province of Bengal were car-
rying out a series of dacoities or gang robberies in neighboring Eastern
Bengal and Assam.88 At the end of 1911, Denham’s enthusiastic and
aggressive intelligence work resulted in a failed assassination attempt as he
was leaving the Inspector General of Police’s office in the Writers’ Building
in Dalhousie Square.89
Denham’s ability to detail and analyze the connections between revo-
lutionaries within and outside Bengal led to his being selected as one of
five provincial CID officers deputed to assist David Petrie of the
Department of Criminal Investigation with the investigations into the
December 1912 bombing attack on the Viceroy. Denham’s own investi-
gative work with the Bengal Police had played an important role in colo-
nial authorities’ unraveling of the networks of Bengali and North Indian
revolutionaries who carried out the attack.90 His analysis demonstrated
that the revolutionaries were coordinated in their efforts, “working har-
moniously and in co-operation with one another,” despite the appearance
of a number of different revolutionary parties within Bengal. In addition,
he traced the important role of Chandernagore, the French colony north
of Calcutta, as a source of bombs for both revolutionaries in Bengal and
in the Punjab.91
Denham continued to work for the DCI during the First World War,
acting as their liaison with Bengal and “available for any urgent job that
might arise.”92 Denham’s investigations into revolutionary networks
within and outside India made him a natural candidate to assist Nathan
and US prosecutors with their investigations into the Ghadar Party.
Denham supplied Nathan with intelligence reports from India and carried
out numerous investigative duties in collaboration with agents of the
Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (BOI). After searching
immigration records in San Francisco in order to track “the arrivals and
departures of certain Hindus,” Denham produced a report on the move-
ments of revolutionaries which was utilized by the prosecuting attorney in
the 1917 “Hindu conspiracy” trial. The Indian Police officer reviewed
captured documents and handwriting samples with BOI agent E. M.
Blanford, who was transferred to San Francisco to assist with the
investigation.
Denham also led a team of British agents to Chicago and New York and
interrogated many of the alleged conspirators, including C. K. Chakravarty,
298 M. SILVESTRI
who became a witness for the prosecution. At the trial itself, Nathan and
Denham both sat with the prosecution and offered information and
advice, a fact acknowledged by Indian revolutionaries as well as US gov-
ernment officials.93 By 1918, work related to Indian “seditionists” occu-
pied the entire time of Denham, as well as a stenographer.94 In at least one
instance, Denham’s involvement with the conspiracy trial may have taken
on a more forceful tone typical of the Bengal Police. As we have seen,
Bengal intelligence officers made efforts to seize revolutionaries from
Chandernagore for arrest or interrogation without regard for diplomatic
niceties. According to M. N. Roy, who fled to Mexico to escape prosecu-
tion in the conspiracy case, Denham orchestrated efforts to kidnap him
and return him to the United States to face prosecution, and may have
come to Mexico himself in order to achieve this.95
Following the conclusion of the “Hindu Conspiracy Case,” federal
attorney Charles Warren acknowledged the prominent contribution of
Nathan, Denham, and other British intelligence representatives:
The success of this case, especially so far as the Hindu defendants were con-
cerned, was very largely, if not entirely, due to the very able and exhaustive
investigations that were conducted by the British agents … I have never seen
more full, complete, accurate, and intelligence reports than were produced
by these Agents. They stood at my elbow during the entire trial, and when-
ever any point of information was desired, it was forthcoming immediately.96
5 Postwar Intelligence in North America

In spite of the satisfaction of British authorities with the prosecution of the
members of the Ghadar Party, the threat which anticolonial activism posed
to the British Empire seemed to only escalate after the Great War.
Bolshevism was added to the array of revolutionary movements which
sought the downfall of the empire. While imperial panics and anxieties did
not originate in the aftermath of the Great War, they were given new
intensity, as fears of anticolonial collaboration, often tied to Communist
ideals, escalated.97 Fears of colonial “Germano-Bolshevik” conspiracies
were pronounced among both British and French officials.98 Priya Satia
has called attention to what she terms the “official conspiracy theories” of
British colonial officials following the Great War, which built on but also
embellished elaborate networks of anticolonial collaboration involving
Irish and Indian nationalists, Bolshevists and Islamists.99 While officers
experienced in the campaign against the Bengal revolutionaries continued

to play important roles in countering a wide variety of threats to the
empire across the globe, these were to reveal the limitations as well as the
strengths of their intelligence experience.
In the United States, the focus of postwar British intelligence broad-
ened beyond the activities of Irish republicans and Indian anticolonialists.
Intelligence officers such as Robert Nathan took an increasing interest in
other forms of radical politics which were considered destabilizing to the
British Empire. A US Department of Justice officer summed up the wide
range of British interests as “Sinn Fein activities, Hindu activities, Negro
activities (especially as they affect and became part of the activities of all
darker peoples), International radical organizations and individuals, and
radical affairs of all kinds in the United States.” The author of the report,
entitled “British Espionage in America,” added that “to the embarrass-
ment of this Department, the English were, at that time, much better
informed in radical circles than was the US Government, at least in
New York.”100
The postwar center of both Indian and Irish nationalist activity was in
New York, where the two main US-based Indian and Irish nationalist
organizations, the Friends of Freedom for India and the Friends of Irish
Freedom, formed close alliances.101 Beginning in the spring of 1918,
Nathan made regular contact with the F. W. Finch, the head of the BOI
office in New York. As M. J. Davis of the Justice Department detailed, the
two began a regular exchange of intelligence:
From that time on, always by previous appointment, [Nathan] made regular
trips to the New York office, where he was permitted to read over current
literature, such as magazines, newspapers, circulars, and at times reports
bearing more or less directly upon activities in British possessions, princi-
pally among revolutionists. At times, in reciprocity, he would follow these
cases out and furnish a report upon the foreign angle of the matter. In other
instances he would make direct requests for information concerning indi-
viduals or organizations, which, in continuance of a longstanding practice of
the office, was complied with. Within a short time Mr. Nathan voluntarily
started bringing, on each trip, half a dozen or more reports on various inter-
national phases of the radical situation. These gradually broadened into
complete and exceptionally intelligent reports upon radical activities right in
New York City.
300 M. SILVESTRI
Davis added that “While Mr. Nathan did not so state, it was a simple mat-
ter to observe that his data was coming from a regularly employed force of
under-cover informants in New York.”102
In January 1919, Nathan took charge of British secret service opera-
tions in the United States.103 While continuing to supervise the surveil-
lance of Indian revolutionaries, he began to take an increasing interest in
communist activities, and focused his attention increasingly on the Lusk
Committee, formed to report on left-wing activity in New York during the
Red Scare.104 In a letter of introduction to the American diplomat Colonel
House in 1919, Wiseman observed that “Mr. Nathan knows more about
the Bolshevist organizations in this country than any other man.”105 As US
intelligence agencies became increasingly uncomfortable with the con-
tinuing operations of British intelligence, overt collaboration seems to
have ceased by the summer of 1919, although discreet British intelligence
work continued to be tolerated.106 While SIS maintained a small presence
in the interwar United States under the cover of Passport Control, Nathan
“hurriedly” departed for Britain in July or August 1919 to take charge of
Political Section V of SIS.107 From the time of his appointment in 1919 as
head of Political Section V until his death in 1921 at the age of 54, Nathan
was, in the assessment of Keith Jeffery, “the second most important officer
in SIS.”108
6 Postwar Intelligence in Asia

While Robert Nathan achieved professional and intelligence success in his
surveillance efforts of revolutionaries in postwar New York, elsewhere the
results of Bengal officers’ efforts were more mixed. Not only were they
forced to contend with new types of anticolonial threats, in contrast to the
familiar forms of “revolutionary conspiracy” which the Ghadar Party’s alli-
ance with Germany and Bengal revolutionaries presented, but they found
that their methodologies from Bengal were not always so transferable to
colonial situations elsewhere. These officers also came up against a persis-
tent problem faced by postwar British intelligence agencies: retrenchment
which cut staff and budgets and forced them to consider the choice of
returning to Bengal or leaving imperial service altogether.
Like Nathan, Godfrey Denham continued his career as an imperial intel-
ligence officer after the Great War. Denham first returned to India, where he
was appointed temporary Deputy Inspector General of DCI for six months
beginning in March 1918. In the following year, Denham succeeded
David Petrie as DCI’s representative in Shanghai, and assumed charge of

the Indian intelligence network Petrie had established in East Asia during
the latter half of the war.109 Denham received the same title of Vice-Consul
which Petrie had held, and participated in the Shanghai Intelligence
Bureau, a grouping of previously autonomous intelligence agencies oper-
ating in East Asia which had been established in 1916. In December 1920
SIS Director Sir Mansfield Cumming and the India Office agreed to
appoint Denham as “head of the organization” in East Asia “with a man-
date to be in charge of all our work in Japan, China, Tibet and Siberia and
Southern Asia.”110 His salary was paid by the India Office while MI6 pro-
vided another £10,000 for three years of work.
The detail and scope of the analyses produced by Denham, reveal both
the limitations and drawbacks of his Indian intelligence experience. A
forty-five page report on “Bolshevism and Chinese Communism and
Anarchism” “pulled together all the available information on left-wing
personalities, organizations and activities in China.”111 Yet Denham’s ten-
dency to analyze as well as collate information, both hallmarks of Indian
Police intelligence officers who were used to having an influence in shap-
ing colonial policies against the revolutionaries, were not warmly received
by diplomatic authorities. The British embassy in Tokyo objected to
another lengthy and expansive analysis by Denham on the subject of
“socialistic and other revolutionary movements,” entitled “’Dangerous
thoughts’ in Japan.” The latter report estimated the membership of revo-
lutionary societies at 57,000, while diplomatic sources indicated a figure
closer to 7000.112
To Denham, however, the production of intelligence, not simply the
collection and collation of information, was a fundamental part of his role
as an intelligence officer, and he did not hesitate to stress his opinions
about its importance to the empire. Arguing for the continuance of the
Intelligence Bureau based in Shanghai in 1920, Denham wrote, “The
world is in a state of extreme unrest and it is of the utmost importance for
Government to have full information regarding that unrest and the differ-
ent forms it takes. We surely ought to have learnt the lessons the war has
taught us, and be awake and on our guard next time.”113 While in the
context of India, or the wartime prosecution of Indian revolutionaries in
the United States, such an expansive vision was seen as a natural part of
intelligence, both SIS and diplomatic authorities saw Denham as overstep-
ping his bounds. Dealing with the diplomats who provided much of
British intelligence in the region was a different matter than advising US
302 M. SILVESTRI
and Canadian police with little knowledge of Asia or Asia revolutionaries,

and Denham’s outlook, shaped by his time in Indian intelligence, clearly
clashed with the analyses of British diplomatic and intelligence personnel
in the region.
Retrenchment by both the India Office and SIS led to the end of
Denham’s Singapore posting, although not his career in imperial intelli-
gence.114 While the Government of Bengal was eager for him to return to
the Bengal Police IB, and made clear that they would regard his accep-
tance of another position outside India as “a definite abandonment (which
they would much deplore) of his service,” Denham was far from eager to
return to India. Indeed, he was only one of a number of Indian Police
officers in the province, including some prominent members of the
Intelligence Branch, who chose to retire early following the First World
War due to the sustained campaigns of the revolutionaries.115 According to
the Viceroy, Denham “on the ground that he is clearly remembered in
Bengal and would, as a result of the developments which have recently
taken place in India, be a marked man, which fact renders further service
in Bengal almost impossible for him.” Rather, he preferred to take his
proportionate pension from the Indian Police and retire from service.116
He instead accepted an appointment as Inspector General of the
Singapore Police, where he remained for two years.117 Denham had already
been involved in the organization of an intelligence bureau in the Straits
Settlements two years earlier. Indeed, a report on the first year of the
operations of the new intelligence organization noted that Denham had
“laid down the principles on which a Political Intelligence Bureau should
be organized.” These principles were “largely followed” with only “cer-
tain modifications, to suit local conditions.”118 In addition to innovations
such as the adoption of a cipher system, the Political Intelligence Bureau
(PIB) established along the lines suggested by Denham had a strong trans-
national focus. The monthly Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence car-
ried a broad political and geographical spectrum of information on global
anticolonial activities and opinions, and the movement of peoples, weap-
ons, and ideas. Topics ranged from the state of Indo-Irish and Indo-
Chinese nationalist collaboration in New York City to reports of spider
webs in Malaya which mysteriously appeared with the image of Mahatma
Gandhi.119
An analysis of the PIB’s first year of operation noted with pride the
appreciative comments which the “wide circulation” of their monthly
intelligence summaries had drawn.120 The PIB also established “direct
communication … at an early date with the Central Security Department

(under Colonel Sir V. G. W. Kell) in London” as well as the Intelligence
Bureau of the GOI, the Joint Naval and Military Intelligence Bureau at
Hong Kong, and diplomatic authorities at Bangkok and Batavia. All of
these supplied intelligence to the PIB, such as the Delhi Intelligence
Bureau’s Weekly Intelligence Summary and abstracts of English and ver-
nacular Indian provincial newspapers. The heavy Indian influence on intel-
ligence in the Straits Settlements was further emphasized by the PIB’s
request to the Government of India for an Indian police officer for a two-
year posting as “an independent check on the information supplied by the
Police Department.” Considerable vernacular literature from India
reached the Straits Settlements. In response Denham stressed, again draw-
ing on his Indian experience, the need for a sub-department of vernacular
translation, although the PIB chose instead to utilize various government
agencies to scrutinize the Chinese, Gurmukhi, Malay, Tamil, and
Japanese press.121
7 Irish and Indian Intelligence

While stationed in Singapore in 1920, Godfrey Denham was recalled to
the United Kingdom for an intelligence mission in one of the major the-
aters of the postwar British “crisis of empire”: Ireland. Denham was joined
by his Bengal Police colleague Charles Tegart, who had also been employed
on imperial intelligence matters. After serving as an advisor to the Sedition
Committee, appointed to investigate Indian revolutionary activity at the
end of the Great War, Tegart was deputed to IPI, where he served until
1923. In the summer of 1920, Tegart was working for IPI in London,
where he shared a house in Kensington with IPI director J. A. Wallinger,
when he was recruited for service in Ireland along with Denham. The Irish
War of Independence, as Paul McMahon has contended, was for both
republican insurgents and Crown forces in large part an intelligence war,
in which access to information was crucial to the outcome.122 Tegart and
Denham arrived in Ireland at a time when the civil, military, and intelli-
gence administration had been overhauled, and when the Irish Republican
Army’s campaign against the police and military had begun to escalate
significantly. Their appointment had been at the request of Prime Minister
David Lloyd George, who had requested the loan of Indian officers from
Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu.123
304 M. SILVESTRI
The Bengal Police officers served under another officer with Indian
experience, the chief of Irish intelligence and deputy police chief Colonel
Ormonde de L’Épée Winter. Winter, one of the most flamboyant figures
of the War of Independence, was a career military officer as well as a skilled
rider, an enthusiastic pigsticker, and a highly successful investor in race-
horses. Although a combat veteran of the Great War, he had virtually no
previous police or intelligence experience.124 As Peter Hart observed,
“Winter generally impressed men as a dapper, if somewhat stagy, racon-
teur: eccentric and adventurous.”125 His main task was to coordinate army
and police intelligence in Ireland. To do so, he envisioned “a multilayered
bureaucracy that operated completely independently of the army’s intelli-
gence infrastructure.”126 The cornerstone of this was to be a London
secret service bureau which was to recruit Irishmen in Britain and send
them to Ireland as agents, equipped with secret ink in which to send their
reports back to London.127
Tegart and Denham were recruited to head this new London bureau.
Many of the features of the War of Independence with which they were
confronted would have appeared familiar to them from their experience in
Bengal: the importance of intelligence, the extensive reliance on agents
and informers in order to penetrate revolutionary groups and the insur-
gents’ ruthless campaign against those who gave information to imperial
forces. Indeed, Tegart’s main suggestion for combatting Irish republicans
was to replicate the approach of the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch in
order to set up what he considered to be a durable and comprehensive
system of intelligence. He cautioned that he had no magical solution to
British intelligence dilemmas in Ireland, or that because of “my previous
experience in India that I possess some ‘open sesame’, some quick and
ready method of establishing an intelligence system in Ireland which will
help the authorities to deal with the situation.” Rather, Tegart emphasized
how intelligence successes in Bengal were based upon years of patient
police work that enabled officers to build up an intimate understanding of
revolutionary networks:
The intelligence system established to deal with the Indian Revolutionary

movement with which I was associated, and the history of the growth,
development and ultimate failure of the conspiracy, was the result of five
years plodding and patient investigation assisted by a large and highly trained
office in which all information was carefully and systematically indexed, col-
lated and pieced together.
Tegart argued that there would be a need to duplicate the same type of
painstaking police work in Ireland. The first task would be to assemble,
collate, and analyze information in much the same way that the Bengal
Police Intelligence Branch had done. Tegart observed that “In my view
the first essential is to collect all papers bearing on the situation from what-
ever quarter available,—Dublin Castle, D.M.P. R.I.C. Scot. Yard M.I.5.
etc. [sic]—and to study them carefully, compiling History sheets, card
indices etc.” He admitted that such an approach would be time-consuming,
and possibly at odds with the desire for someone who would “strike imme-
diately” against Irish republicans, but added that
I know of no short cuts which are likely to succeed, the only way I can sug-
gest is so thorough a sifting of the material which it is hoped already exists
and which will be collected in the future, as to afford a sufficiently detailed
knowledge of the enemy organization to suggest the lines for attacking it.128
This “plodding and patient” approach which sought to create an Irish

version of the Bengal police archive on revolutionary terrorism clashed
with Winter’s desire for agents who would immediately send reports on
the republican movement. Tegart and Denham in turn found Winter’s
approach to intelligence amateurish, and their tenure in the Irish adminis-
tration lasted only four months.129 While the effort to import intelligence
practices from Bengal to Ireland made little impact (Tegart’s successor as
head of the London Bureau quickly sent agents who produced very little
useful intelligence), Tegart’s arguments about the difficulty of compiling
and acting on political intelligence in a short period of time seemed to
have been absorbed by Winter. In a report on Irish intelligence, written in
late 1921 or early 1922, Winter observed that “To build up an Intelligence
organisation for the investigation of political crime in a few months is,
practically, an impossibility. The Criminal Investigation Department of
India was in being seven years before it commenced to yield any appre-
ciable results.”130
8 Bengal Terrorism and Palestine

Following the abortive efforts to set up an intelligence network in Ireland,
Tegart returned to intelligence work against Indian revolutionaries in IPI
and the Calcutta Police.131 By the time of his retirement from the Indian
Police in 1931, he had acquired the reputation as an authority on “Indian
306 M. SILVESTRI
terrorism.” For the next five years he served on the Council of India,
where he continued to express forceful opinions about the policing of the
Bengali revolutionary movement. In 1933, Tegart’s intervention per-
suaded the India Office to reject a proposal by the Government of Bengal
to convert a Deputy Commissioner of the Calcutta Port Police to a lower-
level Assistant Commissioner position. He objected that such a move
would have a negative impact on the work of the port, and in particular on
the issue of arms smuggling, one of the most important concerns of the
Government of Bengal regarding the revolutionary movement.132 Tegart’s
appointment to the Council of India was itself a reflection of the increased
importance given to the Indian Police as one of the two “security services”
of the Government of India, a term which was frequently deployed in the
interwar period.
Tegart’s address to the Royal Empire Society on 1 November 1932 on
the subject of “Terrorism in India” was another such recognition of the
prominent role of career policemen within the British Empire. His lengthy
lecture was delivered to what the Statesman’s correspondent called “the
largest and most influential Anglo-Indian gathering that I have ever seen
in London.”133 Although Tegart referenced other Indian revolutionary
movements, “in view of its importance,” he devoted almost the entire
lecture to Bengal. Considered an authoritative statement on Indian revo-
lutionary movements, his lecture, as we have seen, also reproduced some
of the most notorious colonial stereotypes on Bengalis and “Bengali
terrorism.”134
Tegart’s reputation as a leading member of the Indian “security ser-
vices” led to another effort to apply imperial intelligence and counter-
insurgency expertise elsewhere in the empire. In 1937, he was offered the
position of Inspector General of the Palestine Police during the Arab
Revolt. He declined, citing his “ignorance of local conditions and police
organisation and personnel,” and proposed instead that he, along with a
former Indian Police colleague, be deputed to study and issue recommen-
dations on improving the police.135 Tegart’s choice of associate was another
former Indian Police officer, David Petrie, who was well-versed in the his-
tory of Indian revolutionaries. Petrie, a graduate of Aberdeen University,
had served in the Indian Police from 1900–1936, and had for much of his
career been involved in intelligence work against the revolutionaries. In
addition to supervising Denham and other officers in the investigation of
the Delhi bombing attack on Lord Hardinge, he had helped establish the
Indian intelligence network in East Asia during the Great War. Petrie
authored intelligence reports on the Ghadar Party and Indian commu-

nism and served as Director of the Intelligence Bureau from 1924
to 1931.136
Tegart and Petrie formed part of a wider circulation of police officers to
the Palestine Mandate during the interwar period. Indeed, Palestine was
one of the most pronounced examples of the cross-colonial movement of
police personnel in this era.137 The British Section of the Palestine
Gendarmerie (1922–1926) was initially formed almost entirely from
members of the disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary and its Auxiliary
Division. The Gendarmerie’s principal role was to act as a riot squad,
allowing for a reduction in the British military presence in the Mandate.138
Nor were Tegart and Petrie the first colonial police officers to attempt a
comprehensive overhaul of the Palestine Police. Following a week of riots
in 1929 in which Arabs attacked Jewish communities across the Mandate,
the Inspector General of the Ceylon Police Force, Herbert Dowbiggin,
was sent to Palestine at the beginning of the following year to reorganize
the police. Dowbiggin had already acquired a reputation as “an expert at
preserving law and order in various regions where ‘mixed religious, racial
and political aspirations’ prevailed.”139
Dowbiggin, as he had elsewhere in the British Empire, advocated a
model of civil policing based on the London Metropolitan Police and his
experience with the unarmed police force of Ceylon.140 The reorganized
police force proved wholly inadequate, however, to counter the guerilla
warfare of the Arab Revolt. Historians have cautioned not to exaggerate
the contrast between Dowbiggin’s and Tegart’s concepts of colonial polic-
ing—the brutal search tactics of Dowbiggin’s reformed constabulary
alienated Arab members of the police, many of whom began actively aid-
ing the rebels.141 Yet in many substantive ways Tegart’s recommendations
significantly diverged from his predecessor. In contrast to his proposals for
his intelligence mission in Ireland, in which he sought to a great degree to
replicate the methods of the Bengal Police IB, in Palestine Tegart’s pro-
posals, typically for colonial policing, adapted a medley of police methods
derived from the Indian Police and elsewhere.
Tegart and Petrie’s recommendations rejected Dowbiggan’s vision of a
predominantly civil police force, and sought instead to build up the capac-
ity of the police through a Frontier Force, Rural Mounted Police and a
“police strike force” to be deployed from headquarters. While attempting
to create a police force which could operate effectively in peacetime as well
as against an insurgency, their emphasis was on building up the Palestine
308 M. SILVESTRI
Police as a security force.142 The most well-known of his recommendations

to be implemented was one of the most ambitious security projects to be
undertaken anywhere in the British Empire to this point: the construction
of a security fence along the Palestinian border with Syria and Lebanon,
and a series of seventy fortified police posts throughout the Mandate.143
Tegart regarded this as the most pressing need in the reorganization of the
police, and pushed for the fence to be constructed without an open bid-
ding process; the cost was estimated by one source at more than £2 mil-
lion.144 The fortified police stations became known as “Tegart forts” or
simply “Tegarts” or “Taggarts.”145
The Colonial Office referred to Tegart’s proposals as “revolution-
ary,”146 yet in many respects they repeated lessons of policing that the
former Police Commissioner had learned during his career in India. Tegart
and Petrie drew parallels between the Punjab and Northwest Frontier of
India in their analysis of the Palestine Revolt and policing solutions for it.
“Upper India (Punjab or N.W.F.P),” Tegart and Petrie wrote, “presents
conditions more similar to Palestine than S. India.”147 The Punjab, as
Mark Condos has shown, formed an important resource for British poli-
cymaking about anticolonial insurgency in India and throughout the
empire, and the influence of the Punjab was prominent in Tegart and
Petrie’s recommendations for both intelligence work and paramilitary
policing.148 While Tegart attributed the choice of the “hard-headed” Scot
to accompany him in order to balance out his “impulsive” and “impa-
tient” Irish nature, Petrie’s experience in northwestern India seems to
have been a factor as well. Petrie began his policing career in the Punjab
and prior to the Great War had been seconded to the Samana Rifles, a
paramilitary force in the Northwest Frontier Province. Petrie’s extensive
intelligence experience also included investigations into the Ghadar Party;
he compiled a directory of Ghadar Party members and was shot and
wounded by Sikh migrants of the Komagata Maru who were forced to
return to India in September 1914.149
Tegart and Petrie recommended that an Indian Police officer be sec-
onded to Palestine to provide “expert guidance” for the CID, and stipu-
lated that an officer with experience in the Punjab would be preferable. In
their report they recommended Superintendent W. N. P. Jenkin, whose
experience of CID service in the Punjab had impressed Petrie.150 Tegart
and Petrie’s recommendations also featured prominently the imperial ideal
of the “martial races,” particularly as manifested in the Punjab and the
Northwest Frontier. For the staffing of the Rural Mounted Police, a
core element of their proposals, the two officers emphasized that “the
tough type of man, not necessarily literate, who knows as much of the
game as the other side” was required for “rough work of this class.”151
Indeed, Tegart’s recommendations drew not only on policing in the
Punjab and India’s Northwest Frontier but in insurgent Ireland as well, as
measures such as the mounted police and a mobile police striking force
shifted the Palestine police back toward a gendarmerie-style force.152
Yet Tegart’s recommendations for reform in Palestine also incorporated
long-standing police practices from Bengal. Tegart drew on his experience
as Police Commissioner of Calcutta, where his responsibilities were not
only with intelligence work, but with the policing of a large and diverse
urban population, and issues of organized crime and communal distur-
bances. The lessons that Tegart drew from his experience in Calcutta, that
colonial police forces had to be flexible and mobile and be able to shift
from ordinary policing to suppress riots and public disturbances, were
ones that he attempted to apply in Palestine.153 Other recommendations
in Tegart and Petrie’s report were based specifically upon intelligence
practices in Bengal. Intelligence was at the core of their recommendations;
at the very outset of their report they noted that the C.I.D. was the
“Cinderella of the Force,” and that the force’s intelligence capacities
needed to be “strengthened and reorganized,” with not simply an increase
of personnel but “expert control” and “properly trained” staff.154
Following the practice of the Bengal Police IB, Tegart and Petrie
stressed the need both for more secure housing for Palestinian members
of the CID and for reassurances to be given to officers that their families
would be provided for in case of their death. As we have seen, both prac-
tices were important elements of the IB’s efforts to build an elite cadre of
Indian intelligence officers.155 “It is clearly impossible to expect indige-
nous police to work loyally in support of Government,” Tegart and
Petrie wrote,
in the face of terrorism, banditry and, at times, rebellion, if they have daily,
after their period of duty, to return to their families or houses located in the
poorest localities among the people whom it is their duty to arrest, or pos-
sibly shoot. While the married man is on duty, what is the position of his
family? … Government is powerless to repair a great deal of the conse-
quences, within the family circle, of assassinations, but it has a burden and
inescapable duty to discharge, namely to see that the dependents of any
officer, who had lost his life in their service, are adequately provided for.156
310 M. SILVESTRI
Lastly, the recommendations reflected an important element of Tegart’s

reputation as an expert opponent of “Bengali terrorism”: the develop-
ment of a staff of police “watchers.” In Petrie’s judgment, Tegart in
Bengal had developed “a highly competent staff of watchers,” training
them “to a degree of efficiency that can but rarely have been attained else-
where.” This reflected both the pervasive colonial concerns with surveil-
lance and a concrete measure to protect intelligence officers. In Petrie’s
Orientalist formulation, “in an Eastern city the jostling loafers, hawkers,
street vendors and beggars” provided “useful cover” for police surveil-
lance, and Tegart and Petrie recommended that “a posse of trained
Palestinian watchers form part of the new C.I.D.” “We were struck, when
looking into some of the cases of assassination,” they wrote, “…by the
lack of a precaution which was adopted with good results in India, namely
trained plain clothes police, sometimes in disguise, detailed to survey
beforehand the surroundings of places which an officer on the danger list
had to, or was known to, frequent.”157 Tegart and Petrie regarded all three
of these issues—housing, compensation for families and the development
of a trained staff of watchers—as among the reforms “demanding the
immediate attention of Government.”158
It is in a sense difficult to disentangle the “Punjab” methods of counter-
insurgency policing from the “Bengal” methods advocated by Tegart and
Petrie to the Palestine Police. This is illustrated by the use of collective
punishment as a means to combat the Arab Revolt. While collective fines
had been used in Palestine since the mid-1920s, the 1937 Defence Order
in Council extended the use of collective punishments to the entire coun-
try, and allowed for the destruction of homes and other property which
were deemed to be used as a base for rebels.159 The necessity of collective
punishment for acts of Indian criminality formed a fundamental part of
British thinking about Indian society from the establishment of colonial
rule.160 The use of collective punishments, originally applied to “heredi-
tary” criminals and “criminal” castes and tribes, grew broader in the final
decades of colonial rule and was widely deployed in the Punjab and Bengal
alike. This formed another resource on which Tegart drew in formulating
his strategies for combatting the Arab insurgency.161 The use of collective
fines for villages was deployed in Bengal in the 1930s in order to deprive
revolutionaries in Chittagong of the assistance of the local population. In
Palestine, Charles Tegart strongly advocated the separation of Arab vil-
lages into “good” and “bad” settlements, and the levying of collective
fines and punishments in order to deprive insurgents of support.
While Tegart envisioned a transition from the Arab insurgency to a

return to what within the colonial context was considered “ordinary”
policing, the policing methods which he introduced in the effort to sup-
press the revolt introduced a new wave of brutal treatment of suspected
insurgents. Recent historiography has stressed that the suppression of the
Arab Revolt was more brutal than previously assumed.162 Tegart already
enjoyed a reputation for abuse among Bengali revolutionaries and had
been the victim of numerous assassination attempts.163 (He was to survive
another attempt in Palestine on 31 December 1938 which killed his police
colleague G. D. Sanderson.) While Tegart, a graduate of the Portora Royal
School in Enniskillen, favored the recruitment of public school graduates
for the CID headquarters, for police units which would attempt to quell
riots and disturbances such as the “Rural Mounted Police,” he advocated
the recruitment of men from a different background. “What is required is
the tough type of Policeman,” Tegart wrote, “who knows as much of the
game as the other side.”164 Tegart arranged the importation of Doberman
dogs from South Africa for the purpose of “terrorist tracking,” and estab-
lished a center in Jerusalem to train police and military in interrogation
techniques.165 At the center, suspected insurgents were subjected to
humiliation and physical torture. The “water can” method, which involved
the pouring of water into a prostrate and restrained subject’s nostrils, was
considered preferable to beatings because it left no evidence of mistreat-
ment.166 District Commissioner Edward Keith-Roach praised Tegart’s
bravery, but nonetheless disparaged the “‘Arab investigation centres’”
which the former Indian intelligence officer founded, “at which ‘selected’
police officers were to be trained in the gentle art of ‘third degree’, for use
on Arabs until they ‘spilled the beans’, as it is termed in criminal circles.”167
* * *
By the time of the Arab Revolt, colonial authorities could turn to officers
such as David Petrie and Charles Tegart whose experience encompassed
anticolonial revolutionary movements not only in India but also in Ireland
and Southeast Asia. Petrie and Tegart formed only a small albeit influential
part of a much larger circulation of police and intelligence officials around
the British Empire in the years leading up to the Second World War. In
part, their experiences show how imperial policing careers were forged in
what Robert Bickers has referred to as “the ordinary Empire world.”168
Concerns such as pay, pensions, and security loomed large in their
312 M. SILVESTRI
ecisions, as they did for policemen around the empire. Fear of assassina-
d
tion by Bengali revolutionaries helped determine Godfrey Denham’s deci-
sion to become Inspector General of the Singapore Police. Before Tegart
undertook the posting in Palestine, the Government of Palestine promised
to pay two-thirds of the amount of his Indian Police pension to his widow
were he to be killed.169
Equally significant was the medley of policing methods from the empire
world that Tegart and Petrie could choose to deploy. By the mid-1930s,
imperial intelligence agencies had been attempting to monitor and neu-
tralize anticolonial Indian revolutionaries in various parts of South,
Southeast, and East Asia and North America for several decades.
Techniques of surveillance, information-gathering, and intelligence analy-
sis blended with paramilitary policing, coercive interrogation, and collec-
tive punishment as strategies to subdue anticolonial insurgency. In the
decade surrounding the Great War, colonial officials such as Petrie, Tegart,
Denham, Nathan, and Hopkinson had helped to pioneer a role for impe-
rial intelligence officials. By 1937, the posting of Tegart and Petrie was in
a sense an ordinary event, one further posting for Indian Police officers
well versed in techniques of intelligence and counter-insurgency and their
application in diverse colonial contexts.
By the 1940s, the revolutionary movement in Bengal had transformed
itself over the decades, and revolutionaries had become interested in other
methodologies of anticolonial resistance. Colonial officials in Bengal con-
tinued to wait for a resurgence of “Bengali terrorism” while officials with
backgrounds in Indian intelligence continued to deploy their skills around
the empire and beyond its borders. The epilogue will examine these issues.

London
CS Chief Secretary
University

IO India Office
London
Pol Political
Sec. Secretary
Bengal, 1995)
Notes
1. Sunday Express, 24 October 1937; and Belfast Telegraph, 22 October
1937. Clippings in Tegart Papers, Box 5, File 2, Middle East Centre
Archive, St. Antony’s College, Oxford [hereafter MECA].
2. North China Herald, 27 October 1937.
3. Nottingham Guardian, 23 October 1937; and Empire News, 24 October
1937. Clippings in Tegart Papers, Box 5, File 2, MECA.
4. The Examiner (Launceston, Tasmania), 11 December 1937; Sunday
Times (Perth), 28 November 1937; and Voice (Hobart), 27 December
1937.
5. John M. MacKenzie, “T. E. Lawrence: The Myth and the Message,” in
Robert Giddings, ed., Literature and Imperialism (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1991), 150–181; and Michael Paris, “Fiction of
Imperialism,” History Today 63: 5 (2013), 28–34.
6. Palestine Royal Commission Report (1937), 135. Available at http://
history-lab.org. Accessed 4 September 2018.
7. Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information
Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2005).
314 M. SILVESTRI
8. Jill C. Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 2.
9. David Lambert and Alan Lester, “Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects,” in
David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British
Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3.
10. Lambert and Lester, “Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects,” 9–10.
11. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 14.
12. Lambert and Lester, “Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects,” 24.
13. Robert Bickers, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai
(New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2003).
14. Lambert and Lester, “Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects,” 30; and Philip
Howell and David Lambert, “Sir John Pope Hennessey and Colonial
Government: Humanitarianism and the Translation of Slavery in the
Imperial Network,” in Lambert and Lester, eds., Colonial Lives, 237.
15. The Inspector General of the Bombay Police also studied reports of the
anthropometric system deployed in Paris, but remained suspicious of
“scientific” measurements of criminals. He wrote that the Bombay system
in contrast “is simple and easily learnt, and does not require the great
accuracy that anthropometrical measurements do. A very slight degree of
carelessness in that process would render the entire measurements use-
less.” IG, Bombay Police, to Undersec. to Judicial Department,
Government of Bombay, 22 December 1892, GOB Judicial (Police)
Proceedings, A, May 1893, Nos. 9–11, WBSA.
16. While the Home Office considered it impossible for Wallinger to be
“attached” to the Metropolitan Police in the manner he had suggested,
they stated that if he were to call at New Scotland Yard, “all possible facili-
ties will be afforded him for familiarizing himself with its work.” Charles
S. Murdoch, HO, to Undersec. of State, IO, 9 February 1903,
17. Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British
Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924 (London:
Frank Cass, 1995), 98.
18. Cited in Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London
Metropolitan Police before the First World War (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1987), 52.
19. Porter, Vigilant State, 194.
20. Georgina Sinclair and Chris A. Waters, “‘Home and Away’: The Cross-
Fertilization between ‘Colonial’ and ‘British’ Policing, 1921–85,”
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35: 2 (2007), 221–238.
21. Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in
Colonial India (Basingstoke and Oxford: Macmillan, 2003).
22. Keith Breckenridge, Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification

and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 68.
23. Porter, Vigilant State, 156 and 232; and Lord Crewe, Sec. of State, to
Lord Hardinge, Governor of Bengal, 3 April 1913, enclosing undated
memo by Henry, Hardinge papers, 119/1/15, Cambridge University
Library.
MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009); and Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of
the Secret Intelligence Service (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).
25. This was, as Calder Walton notes, “an unusually large collection of Indian
veterans for any British government department outside India itself.”
Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the
Twilight of Empire (London: HarperPress, 2013), 11.
26. “D. Branch Report. Summary,” (1921), pp. 14–15. KV 1/19, National
Archives, NA UK.
27. Jeffery, MI6, 167.
28. Peter Heehs, “Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism
29. C. J. Stevenson-Moore, DCI, to P. C. Lyon, CS to GOEB&A, 5 June
1908, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 390C of 1909, WBSA.
30. Note by H. LeMesurier, IG, EB&A, 5 July 1908, GOB Home (Pol)
Conf. No. 390C of 1909, WBSA.
31. Note by H. LeMesurier, IG, EB&A, 15 June 1908, GOB Home (Pol)
Conf. No. 390C of 1909, WBSA.
32. A request for police assistance from Scotland Yard in 1914 in connection
with the Delhi Bomb Conspiracy evoked a similarly skeptical response
from Edward Henry and DCI Charles Cleveland. Cleveland emphasized
that “Scotland Yard” detectives did not possess any magical powers to
unravel “political plots and secrets which had baffled the whole body of
Indian Police and public servants.” C. R. Cleveland to H. Wheeler, Sec.
to GOI Home, London, 12 September 1913, GOI Home (Poll) Deposit
No. 33, November 1914, NAI.
33. Suchentana Chattopadhyay, “The Myth of the Outsider: From Whitehall
to Elysium Row, 1917–21,” Twentieth Century Communism 6: 6 (2014),
113.
34. The Metropolitan Police assured the India Office “that every facility will
be afforded Mr. Curzen for studying the system of registration in use in
this Department.” J. H. Kerr, CS to GOB, to Sec., Judicial & Public
Dept., IO, 17 September 1919; and Assistant Sec. to Commissioner,
Metropolitan Police, to Undersec. of State, Public Dept., IO, 5 November
1919. P&J No. 6478 of 1919, L/P&J/6/1630, APAC BL.
316 M. SILVESTRI
35. See, for example, the reports collected in Volume V of TIB, such as
“Memorandum on the Anti-British Agitation among the Natives of India
in England,” and “Report of the Komagatu Maru Committee of
Enquiry.” A report on Indian revolutionary activities in East Asia was also
part of the IB’s collection, but is no longer extant. TIB V: ii.
36. Suchetana Chattopadhyay, “The Bolshevik Menace: Colonial Surveillance
165 (2006), 165–179 (quotation on 173).
37. J. H. Kerr, CS, GOB, to Sec., Judicial & Public Dept., IO, 3 February
1919, P&J No. 1500 of 1919, L/P&J/6/1574, APAC BL.
38. Minute by J. W. Hose. 6 March 1919; Undersec. of State, HO, to
Undersec. of State, IO, 26 March 1919; and Tyson to Undersec. of State,
IO, 19 September 1919, P&J No. 1500 of 1919, L/P&J/6/1574,
APAC BL.
39. H. L. Stephenson, Officiating CS to GOB, to Sir William Maris, Sec. to
GOI, Home, 17 December 1919, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 405
(1–3) of 1919, WBSA; and R. Clarke, Commissioner of Police, Calcutta,
to CS to GOB, 26 February 1920, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 87 of
1920, WBSA. Clarke had also wished to discuss the issue of potential
Bolshevik activity in the province with Tyson.
40. H. E. Stephenson, Bengal Secretariat, to J. E. Ferrard, IO, 24 April 1920,
P&J No. 3223, L/P&J/6/1677, APAC BL.
41. “I fancy that we have in J&P and Political Depts. [sic] practically all the
information as to Bolshevism that has been obtained, and it would be
possible to let Mr Kydd see our collection of reports. It would also be
possible to put him (if he turns out to be discreet) in touch with
Intelligence officers.” Minute by J. W. Hose, 27 May 1920, P&J
No. 3223, L/P&J/6/1677, APAC BL.
42. “Notes made by Mr. Kidd in London regarding Indian agitation abroad,”
[1921], GOB IB No. 83 of 1921, WBSA.
44. For example, in 1911 Hopkinson noted in one of his reports to the
Canadian government that he had “personal knowledge” of the deporta-
tion of the Punjabi Sikh anti-colonial activist Ajit Singh. Hopkinson
explained “I have personal knowledge of Ajit Singh’s deportation to
Mandalay as I was in Calcutta at the time, he was sent to Burma in com-
pany with one Lujput [Lajpat] Rai another agitator.” [sic] Hopkinson to
W. W. Cory, Deputy Minister of the Interior, Ottawa, 8 December 1911,
45. Hopkinson to W. W. Cory, Deputy Minister of the Interior, Ottawa, 16
October 1911, and 23 October 1911, L/P&J/6/1137, APAC BL.
46. Col. E. J. E. Swayne, “Memorandum on Matters affecting the East Indian
Community in British Columbia,” [1909], L/P&J/6/1137, APAC BL.
Hopkinson had served as an interpreter in an abortive Canadian govern-

ment scheme to encourage Sikhs to emigrate from Canada to British
Honduras. The Indians who traveled to British Honduras accused
Hopkinson of attempting to bribe them to immigrate. Popplewell,
Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 151.
47. Hugh J. M. Johnston, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh
Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar (Rev. ed., Vancouver and Toronto:
University of British Columbia Press, 2014), 221.
48. See Chap. 2. Hopkinson’s intelligence reports are at L/P&J/6/1137,
APAC BL.
49. Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History
of India’s Liberation (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2012), 99; and Hopkinson
to W. W. Cory, Deputy Minister of the Interior, Ottawa, 26 September
1911, L/P&J/6/1137, APAC BL.
November 1911, enclosing list of “Hindu students arriving at the ports
of San Francisco and Seattle during the year 1910–11,” L/P&J/6/1137,
APAC BL. Hopkinson’s report of 6 June 1912 included a photograph
and fingerprints obtained from police in Vancouver of one Behary Lall
Varma, along with a warning about his association with Indian “agita-
tors” and a suggestion that the Indian Police watch out for his arrival
within the upcoming months. Hopkinson to W. W. Cory, Deputy
Minister of the Interior, Ottawa, 6 June 1912, L/P&J/6/1137 APAC
BL.
51. Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, 106–107.
52. I owe this point to Gajendra Singh. For further discussion of this issue,
see Chap. 2.
October 1911, L/P&J/6/1137, APAC BL.
54. Note by Malcolm Seton, 7 April 1913, L/P&J/12/1, APAC BL.
55. David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–1947
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 74. For the importance of
Eurasians as Intelligence Branch clerks, see Chap. 3.
56. Johnston, Voyage of the Komagata Maru, 33. Johnston discusses the evi-
dence for his assertion that Hopkinson was Eurasian on 33–34 and
220–222.
57. Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Satoshi Mizutani, The
Meaning of White: Race, Class and the ‘Domiciled Community’ in British
India 1858–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Mizutani
observes that “For the most part, Domiciled Europeans were subject to
the same disadvantages suffered by Eurasians throughout the post-
318 M. SILVESTRI
Mutiny era…. By far the most significant factor in creating these condi-
tions was their common exclusion from the privileges and status according
to non-domiciled members of the white community.” The Meaning of
White, 64–65.
58. Malcolm C. Seton, IO, to Henry Wheeler, GOI, 4 September 1913,
59. Johnston, Komagata Maru, 189–202.
60. Stephanie Chasin, “Citizens of the Empire: Jews in the Service of the
British Empire, 1906–1940,” Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA (2008), 60; and
William D. Rubinstein, Michael Jolles and Hillary J. Rubinstein, The
Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 713. On Matthew Nathan see Anthony P. Haydon,
Sir Matthew Nathan: British Colonial Governor and Civil Servant (St.
Lucia, Queensland, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1976).
62. “Note on the Barar (Nawabganj) Dacoity Case,” nd. Enclosure to
Fortnightly Report on the Political Agitation in EB&A, 29 June 1908,
GOI Home Pol A, July 1908, No. 110. IOR POS 3097, APAC BL; and
“History Sheet. Surendra Nath Sen,” in TIB II: 1161–1166.
63. Robert Nathan, Officiating Commissioner of Dacca Division, to CS to
GOEB&A, 17 September 1907; GOI Home A, November 1907, No.
12, IOR NEG 5942, APAC BL.
64. Memo by R. Nathan, 12 June 1907, GOI Home (Deposit) July 1907,
No. 67, IOR NEG 10608, APAC BL.
65. H. L. Salkeld, “Anushilan Samiti, Dacca, Parts I-IV,” in TIB II: 1–263;
and Popplewell, Imperial Defence, 108.
66. Charles S. Bayley, Acting Lt.-Governor of EB&A, to James Dunlop
Smith, Private Sec. to Viceroy, 15 November 1908, MS 12,673, Minto
Papers, National Library of Scotland.
67. Richard Spence, “Englishmen in New York: The SIS American Station,
1915–21,” Intelligence and National Security 19: 3 (2004), 517.
68. Spence, “Englishmen in New York,” 518–519.
69. The committee included representatives from the Admiralty and the
India, Colonial, Foreign and War Offices. Andrew, Defence of the Realm,
91 and 882.
70. Jeffery, MI6, 112; and Spence, “Englishmen in New York,” 517.
71. The social status of William Wiseman, a baronet, and the favorable
impression that he was able to make on members of the US administra-
tion, particularly Woodrow Wilson’s confidante Colonel House, made
him in Keith Jeffery’s judgment “the most successful ‘agent of influence’
in the first forty years of SIS. Jeffery, MI6, 113.
72. Spence, “Englishmen in New York,” 517.
73. Keith Jeffery observed that “There is very little evidence indeed about the
early work of the Secret Service Bureau in the United States.” Jeffery, SIS,
109.
74. Norman Thwaites, Velvet and Vinegar (London: Grayson and Grayson,
1932), 145.
75. M. J. Davis, “British Espionage in the United States: An Internal
Memorandum of the United States Dept. of Justice, February 15, 1921,”
3. http://marxisthistory.org/history/usa/government/justicedept/
1921/0215-davis-britespionage.pdf. Accessed 20 February 2019.
Nathan’s obituary in The Times stated that “he could be as silent as the
grave; his intimate friends thought he was doing little more than keeping
the War Office informed on Indian conspiracies,” while in reality his
“important and dangerous” wartime work involved “the tracking down
of enemy and anarchical conspiracies.” “Secret Service in the War. Sir
R. Nathan’s Work,” The Times, 28 June 1921.
76. Richard Spence writes, “The officers officially connected … to the SIS
station were only the tip of the iceberg. What really made it work was the
host of agents and informants working in New York and across the coun-
try.” Spence, “Englishmen in New York,” 519.
77. “List of Salaries Paid Monthly and Other Monthly Expenditures,” 29
January 1918, Sir William Wiseman Papers, MS 666, Box 6, Folder 177,
Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
78. Del Campo to Wiseman, 21 November 1918, Sir William Wiseman
Papers, MS 666, Box 1, Folder 17, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale
University Library.
Century Western Europe,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36: 4 (2010), 534.
80. Thwaites, Velvet and Vinegar, 145.
81. Thwaites, Velvet and Vinegar, 147.
82. William Wiseman to Cecil Spring-Rice, 7 March 1917, Sir William
Wiseman Papers, MS 666, Box 6, Folder 164, Manuscripts and Archives,
Yale University Library.
83. Richard Popplewell, “The Surveillance of Indian ‘Seditionists’ in North
America, 1904–1915,” in Christopher Andrew and Jeremy Noakes, eds.,
Intelligence and International Relations 1900–1945 (Exeter: University
of Exeter Press, 1987), 72. The India Office paid Marr’s salary while he
was in North America. Matthew Erin Plowman, “The British Intelligence
Station in San Francisco during the First World War,” Journal of
Intelligence History 12: 1 (2013), 10.
320 M. SILVESTRI
85. F. C. Daly, “Notes on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in

Bengal (1905–1911),” (1911) in TIB I: 26. The chart was appended to
Daly’s report. TIB I: 217–218.
86. In the assessment of Indian intelligence historian and former Director of
the Intelligence Branch of West Bengal, Amiya K. Samanta, Denham was
“a low-profile, highly professional intelligence officer,” who together
with two other Bengal Police colleagues, F. C. Daly and C. W. C. Plowden,
“built up the Bengal Provincial Intelligence Branch from scratch.” Amiya
K. Samanta, “Introduction,” in TIB III: iv.
87. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 106; and Peter Heehs, The
Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India 1900–1910
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 146.
88. G. C. Denham, “Hill Tippera Gang of Political Dacoits,” 19 February
1911, GOB IB No. 18 of 1911, WBSA.
89. A bomb, which failed to explode, was thrown into the car of another
colonial official who was mistaken for Denham. “Note on Outrages,
compiled in 1917 by Mr. J. C. Nixon, I.C.S. Volume III,” in TIB VI:
179–181.
90. See “Mr. Denham’s Reports I, II and III on the Raja Bazar Bomb Case,”
(1913–14) in TIB III: 400–473.
91. “Raja Bazar Bomb Case,” in TIB III: 469–470.
92. Cited in Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 191.
93. Plowman, “The British Intelligence Station,” 10–12; and M. N. Roy,
M. N. Roy’s Memoirs (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1964), 64.
94. “Miscellaneous Functions of New York Office of British Military
Attaché”, 28 March 1918, Sir William Wiseman Papers, MS 666, Box 6,
Folder 173, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
95. Roy, Memoirs, 64. For Bengal Police involvement in Chandernagore, see
Chap. 5.
96. Cited in Plowman, “British Intelligence Station,” 12.
97. For the fundamental place of anxiety and panics in modern empires, see
Harald Fischer-Tiné and Christina Whyte, “Introduction: Empires and
Emotions,” in Harald Fischer-Tiné, ed., Anxieties, Fear and Panic in
Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
98. Daniel Brückenhaus, “Imperial Fears and Transnational Policing in
Europe: The ‘German Problem’ and the British and French Surveillance
of Anti-colonialists in Exile, 1904–1939,” in Fischer-Tiné, ed., Anxieties,
Fear and Panic, 225–258.
of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 201–237.

Memorandum of the United States Dept. of Justice, February 15,
1921,” 2 and 3–4. http://marxisthistory.org/history/usa/govern-
ment/justicedept/1921/0215-davis-britespionage.pdf. Accessed 20
February 2019.
101. Silvestri, Ireland and India, Ch. 1.
Memorandum of the United States Dept. of Justice, February 15, 1921,”
3–4. http://marxisthistory.org/history/usa/government/justicedept/
1921/0215-davis-britespionage.pdf. Accessed 20 February 2019. Davis
also reported that Nathan had periodic contact with the US Department
of Military Intelligence office in New York.
103. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 323.
104. Todd J. Plannestiel, Rethinking the Red Scare: The Lusk Committee and
New York’s Crusade against Radicalism, 1919–23 (London and New York:
Routledge, 2003). Wiseman noted to Colonel House that “Latterly
[Nathan] has been cooperating with the American officials in the study of
the Bolshevist movement here.” Wiseman to House, 22 July 1919,
Edward Mandell House Papers, MS 466, Box 123, Folder 4332,
Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
105. Wiseman to House, 22 July 1919, Edward Mandell House Papers, MS
466, Box 123, Folder 4332, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University
Library.
106. Compare Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 323–324; and
Jeffery, MI6, 250. Jeffery observed that while United States authorities
regarded post-World War I British intelligence work “with some ambiva-
lence,” they never “appear to have demanded that SIS cease spying in the
USA entirely.”
107. Jeffery, MI6, 248–255; and M. J. Davis, “British Espionage in the United
States: An Internal Memorandum of the United States Dept. of Justice,
February 15, 1921,” 4. http://marxisthistory.org/history/usa/govern-
ment/justicedept/1921/0215-davis-britespionage.pdf. Accessed 20
February 2019.
108. Jeffery, MI6, 167.
109. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 304–305, 326. For the
operations of wartime Indian intelligence in East Asia, see Popplewell,
258–296.
110. Cited in Jeffery, MI6, 256. The reports referenced in this and the follow-
ing paragraph are still held by SIS. I am drawing on the information
provided in Keith Jeffery, MI6, except where noted.
111. Jeffery, MI6, 256–257.
322 M. SILVESTRI
112. According to Keith Jeffery, had Denham “confined himself to the collec-
tion and circulation of secret intelligence he might have ruffled fewer
feathers, but his mixture of intelligence and assessment inevitably tres-
passed on the role which the regular diplomats saw as theirs alone.”
Jeffery, MI6, 257.
113. Godfrey C. Denham, British Consulate General, Shanghai, to
Penrhyn Grant Jones, 12 April 1920, FO 228/3214, NA UK.
114. Jeffery, MI6, 257.
115. Among the ten Indian Police officers from Bengal who chose to retire
prematurely in 1921 were two Intelligence Branch officers, J. A. Goldie,
a veteran of the Calcutta Police Special Branch who was serving as Deputy
Inspector General of the Intelligence Branch, and G. W. Dixon, a five-
year veteran of the IB who for two years had served as acting DIG. GOI
Home (Police) No. 409 of 1922, NAI.
116. Telegram from Viceroy to Governor of the Straits Settlements, 12/13
March 1923, FCO 141/16342, NA UK.
117. SIS informed him “that he would be well advised to take the appoint-
ment.” Telegram from Sec. of State for the Colonies to Governor of the
Straits Settlements, 25 January 1923, FCO 141/16342, NA UK.
118. “Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence. Report on First Year (1922).”
119. Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence, No. 1 1 March 1922; No. 3, 10
May 1922; and No. 39, 10 June 1926; L/P&J/12/103, APAC BL.
120. The Indian Political Intelligence archive, for example, contains the
Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence from March 1922 through June
1930.
121. “Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence. Report on First Year (1922).”
122. Paul McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels: British Intelligence and
Ireland, 1916–1945 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008), 26.
123. Eunan O’Halpin, “British Intelligence in Ireland, 1914–1921,” in
Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, eds., The Missing Dimension:
Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1984), 74 and 260.
124. Winter’s appointment as chief intelligence officer owed much to his
friendship with fellow artillery officer General Hugh Tudor, who was
appointed Police Advisor (and later chief of police) in Ireland in May
1920. Winter’s sole intelligence experience was three months serving as a
division intelligence officer during the Dardanelles Campaign.
125. Peter Hart, “Introduction,” in Peter Hart, ed., British Intelligence in
Ireland, 1920–21: The Final Reports (Cork: Cork University Press,
2002), 7.
126. J. B. E. Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War: Britain’s
Counterinsurgency Failure (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2011),
142.
127. McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels, 38–39.
128. Charles Tegart to Sir Malcolm Seton, 1 July 1920, HO 317/59, NA UK.
129. Hittle, Michael Collins, 143; and McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels,
38–39.
130. Ormonde Winter, A Report on the Intelligence Branch of the Chief of
Police, Dublin Castle from May 1920 to July 1921, in Hart, ed., British
Intelligence in Ireland, 74. Another Bengal Police officer named Brian
Wardle served in Ireland from April 1921 to June 1922 during the latter
stage of the War of Independence and the early months of the Irish Free
State. See L/P&J/6/1790, APAC BL.
131. See Chap. 5.
132. Note by C. A. Tegart, 15 June 1933, No. S&G 4824 of 1934,
L/S&G/7/231, APAC BL.
133. Clipping from Statesman, 20 November 1932, Tegart Papers, Box 2, File
5, CSAS. Tegart’s speech is reproduced in TIB III: xxxii–l.
134. Tegart’s “Terrorism in India” was a source, for example, for a War Office
history of terrorism in India. “Terrorism in India. A Summary of Activities
up to March, 1933,” p. 31, 11 May 1933, WO 106/5445, NA UK.
135. Tegart to Sec. of State for the Colonies, 12 October and 18 October
1937, Tegart Papers, Box 4, File 2A, MECA.
136. The Times, 8 August 1961; and Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial
Defence, 265–289.
137. Seán William Gannon, “‘Black-and-Tan Tendencies’: Policing Insurgency
in the Palestine Mandate, 1922–48,” in Brian Hughes and Fergus
Robson, eds., Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 67–88. Benjamin Grob-
Fitzgibbon observes that “Tegart, like so many of the police and intelli-
gence officials in Palestine, was intimately connected with the past
troubles in both India and Ireland.” Grob-Fitzgibbon, “Britain’s Small
Wars, 1881–1951,” in Randall D. Law, ed., The Routledge History of
Terrorism (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 181.
138. Seán William Gannon, “The Formation, Composition, and Conduct of
the British Section of the Palestine Gendarmerie, 1922–1926,” Historical
Journal 56: 4 (2013), 977–1006.
139. Gad Kroizer, “From Dowbiggin to Tegart: Revolutionary Change in the
Colonial Police in Palestine during the 1930s,” Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History 32: 2 (2004), 115–133 (quotation on 119).
140. Kroizer, “From Dowbiggin to Tegart.”
324 M. SILVESTRI
141. Charles Smith, “Communal Conflict and Insurrection in Palestine,

1936–48,” in David M. Anderson and David Killingray, eds., Policing
and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917–65
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), 66–67.
142. As Gad Kroizer concludes, “Tegart attempted to build a versatile, flexible
police force with an emphasis on security.” Kroizer, “From Dowbiggan to
Tegart,” 127.
143. Grob-Fitzgibbon, “Britain’s Small Wars,” 181.
144. The Colonial Office noted that “Sir Charles has stressed that the first
essential step is the construction of a network of Police Stations and
Police Posts throughout the country but his proposals for the future
cadre of the Force have been worked out in close connection with his
proposals for the future accommodation of the Force.” Colonial Office
Memorandum, 12 September 1939, CO 733/389/19, NA UK. For the
costs, see Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the
British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2000), 428–429.
145. For their subsequent history, see Kevin Connolly, “Charles Tegart and
the Forts that Tower over Israel,” BBC Magazine, 10 September 2012,
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19019949. Accessed 6 July
2016.
146. “The Government has been fortunate in having the advice of Sir Charles
Tegart, who has reviewed the whole position and made revolutionary
suggestions for the future organization of the Force.” Colonial Office
Memorandum, 12 September 1939, CO 733/389/19, NA UK.
147. Report by Tegart and Petrie on police reform, 24 January 1938, I, 1.
Tegart Papers, Box 2, File 2, MECA.
149. Tegart memoir, 248; Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence,
167–168 and 265; and The Times, 8 August 1961.
150. “Failing Jenkin, the Director of Intelligence, India, might be asked to
suggest a few names, but we should like to be consulted again before a
selection is made.” Report by Tegart and Petrie on police reform, 24
January 1938, I, 2. Tegart Papers, Box 2, File 2, MECA.
151. Report by Tegart and Petrie on police reform, 24 January 1938, II, 1.
152. Former members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, including the Auxiliary
Division, formed a prominent part of the British Palestine Gendarmerie
(1922–26). Seán William Gannon, The Irish Imperial Service: Policing
Palestine and Administering the Empire, 1922–1966 (London: Palgrave

153. Kroizer, “From Dowbiggan to Tegart,” 124–127.
154. Report by Tegart and Petrie on police reform, 24 January 1938, I, 1.
155. The IB periodically moved its Indian officers into housing in predomi-
nantly European areas of Calcutta where they were deemed to be safer
from attack, and both the Bengal and Calcutta Police strove to assure
officers involved in intelligence work that their families would receive
compensation and a pension in the event of their deaths. See Chap. 3.
156. Report by Tegart and Petrie on police reform, 24 January 1938, XIV, 1
and XII, 1, Tegart Papers, Box 2, File 2, MECA.
157. Tegart memoir, 95–96; and Report by Tegart and Petrie on police
reform, 24 January 1938, XXIV, 1, Tegart Papers, Box 2, File 2, MECA.
158. Tegart and Petrie to Chief Secretary, 24 January 1938, Tegart Papers,
Box 2, File 2, MECA.
159. Jacob Norris, “Repression and Rebellion: Britain’s Response to the Arab
Revolt in Palestine of 1936–39,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth
History 36: 1 (2008), 29.
160. Gavin Rand and Kim A. Wagner, “Recruiting the ‘Martial Races’:
Identities and Military Service in Colonial India,” in Gavin Schaffer, ed.,
Racializing the Soldier (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 35.
161. In the final three decades of colonial rule, as Taylor C. Sherman observes,
“penal tactics tended to be spectacular and collective” in combatting mass
unrest. State Violence and Punishment in Colonial India (London and
162. Matthew Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and
the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” English
Historical Review 124: 507 (2009), 313–354; and Norris, “Repression
and Rebellion,” 25–45.
163. See Chap. 3.
164. Cited in Kroizer, “From Dowbiggin to Tegart,” 125.
165. Norris, “Repression and Rebellion,” 28.
166. Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 416–417.
167. Edward Keith-Roach, Pasha of Jerusalem: Memoirs of a District
Commissioner under the British Mandate, ed. Paul Eedle (London and
New York: The Radcliffe Press, 1994), 191.
168. Bickers, Empire Made Me, 340.
169. Undersec. of State, Colonial Office, to Tegart, 5 November 1937, Tegart
Papers, Box 4, File 2A, MECA.
CHAPTER 8
Epilogue: Bengal Intelligence Officers

and the Second World War
By the beginning of the Second World War, police intelligence officers in

Bengal believed that they could interpret the actions and understand the
future plans of the Bengali revolutionaries with some precision. The
detailed dossiers and comprehensive histories of the revolutionary move-
ment that the Intelligence Branch (IB) had compiled over the previous
decades, officers believed, provide the key to understanding the mind and
motivations of the “Bengali terrorist.”
In July 1940, IB Deputy Inspector General R. E. A. Ray cautioned that
past history of “Bengali terrorism” should remind imperial authorities that
the revolutionaries were capable of bringing about a major disruption to
colonial administration with scant resources. The relatively small number
of revolvers currently possessed by the Anushilan Samiti, he warned, did
not mean that the group was not capable of a substantial assault. The
Chittagong Armoury Raid, Ray wrote in the IB’s weekly intelligence
assessment, “was brought off successfully with two revolvers and three
pistols, a remarkably small number in view of the apparent magnitude of
the task.”1
This study has analyzed how imperial authorities within and outside
India attempted to understand and to suppress the revolutionary move-
ment in Bengal as it developed from the first decade of the twentieth
century to the late 1930s. Colonial anxieties about “Bengali terrorism”
led to the growth of an extensive intelligence apparatus within Bengal.
Intelligence expertise acquired in Bengal was in turn applied globally both

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_8
328 M. SILVESTRI
to the policing of Bengali revolutionaries outside India and to other anti-

colonial movements which threatened the Empire. The first half of the
book explored how the response to the Bengali revolutionaries was rooted
in colonial anxieties about the potential of Indian revolutionaries to dis-
rupt colonial administration, demoralize the ranks of colonial servants,
and threaten the lives of British and Indian officials. Long-standing
assumptions about the nature of Indian criminality and recurrent fears of
a repeat of 1857 provided an important framework for imperial officers
seeking to understand the new phenomena of “Bengali terrorism.” In
response, intelligence officers attempted, with some success, to build intel-
ligence networks throughout the districts of Bengal and established a
voluminous archive on virtually every facet of the revolutionary organiza-
tions, ranging from dossiers on individuals to analyses of institutions and
ideologies, to reports outlining the entire history of the revolution-
ary movement.
The construction of an intelligence apparatus did not, to be sure, elimi-
nate imperial anxieties about revolutionary violence. At various points,
police intelligence, whose structure and archive of knowledge looked
impressive on paper, was exposed as sorely inadequate. This was particu-
larly true when the revolutionaries intensified their anticolonial campaign
following the 1930 Chittagong Armoury Raid. The failure of the police to
provide intelligence on revolutionary plans and to capture revolutionary
leaders and participants in the armory raid led not only to the demoraliza-
tion of the police and other colonial servants but also to widespread calls
for more forceful action, including reprisals, on the part of the white com-
munity of Bengal. As a result, a substantial militarization of policing took
place in Bengal during the 1930s, and military personnel were both used
to bolster police intelligence and to spearhead efforts to reform and reha-
bilitate the “Bengali terrorist” and prevent the “impressionable” Bengali
Hindu youth from joining the ranks of the revolutionary societies.
Part Two of the book examined how this intelligence expertise was
deployed elsewhere in the empire and beyond its borders. Bengali revo-
lutionaries extended their operations overseas in their efforts to obtain
arms and allies, and their actions, along with those of other anticolonial
activists, forced imperial intelligence agencies to attempt to monitor
their activities and thwart their plans. Obtaining arms was a constant
preoccupation of the revolutionaries, who sought to cultivate contacts
ranging from elite anticolonialists to Asian and European maritime work-
ers. Efforts to prevent arms shipments and arms smuggling demonstrate
8 EPILOGUE: BENGAL INTELLIGENCE OFFICERS AND THE SECOND WORLD… 329
not only the range of alliances formed by Bengali revolutionaries but also
the cooperation and tensions between imperial intelligence agencies.
The campaign against the Bengali revolutionaries thus helps us to bet-
ter understand the relationship between modes of colonial policing rooted
in British attitudes to nineteenth-century collective colonial criminality
and what might be considered more modern modes of counter-terrorism
and counter-insurgency practices. This study began with Bengal Police
officers pondering the relevance of criminal tribes, thugs, “frontier fanat-
ics,” and dacoits to a new generation of anticolonial revolutionaries before
the Great War. It subsequently explored the anti-terrorist campaign against
a succeeding generation of revolutionaries whose methods anticipated not
only later battles against the insurgents of the Quit India Movement in
1942 but also the practices of postwar colonial counter-insurgency.
The archive of knowledge and policing structures which colonial intel-
ligence officers developed during the three-decade campaign against
“Bengali terrorism” not only enabled its suppression through legislation
allowing detention without trial but also limited the scope and effective-
ness of these intelligence officers in their operations against the revolu-
tionaries. Even as the revolutionaries in the 1930s began to study and
assimilate new political ideologies such as communism, colonial authori-
ties feared a resurgence of terrorist violence. Two months after the out-
break of the Second World War, R. E. A. Ray expressed concern about the
revival of terrorism among the group known as the Bengal Volunteer
Group. His analysis was filled with discussion of the acts of violence com-
mitted by revolutionaries almost a decade before: the assassinations of
Bengal Police IG F. J. Lowman and the three district magistrates in
Midnapore, and the attempt on the life of Charles Tegart in Dalhousie
Square were all referenced.2
In spite of intelligence officers’ confidence in their abilities, they were
still subject to intelligence failures. This was graphically illustrated by the
final interactions between police intelligence agencies in Bengal and
Subhas Chandra Bose in January 1941. Colonial authorities, as we have
seen, regarded Bose not simply as a nationalist leader but also as a “terror-
ist,” a figure to whom Bengali revolutionaries gave their allegiance and
from whom they took their orders. Bose had been placed under house
arrest at his family’s home at 38/2 Elgin Road in Calcutta since 5
December 1940, following a prison hunger strike.3 Early on the morning
of 17 January 1941, Bose managed to leave home by automobile, dis-
guised as “Muhammad Ziauddin, a Muslim chauffeur,” eluding
330 M. SILVESTRI
lainclothes police guards outside. Colonial authorities did not discover

p
the deception until Bose’s family announced that Subhas had disappeared
on 26th January, the day before he faced a court appearance in Calcutta.
By this point, Bose had already crossed the Northwest Frontier of Britain’s
Indian Empire into neutral Afghanistan, where he traveled onward to
Samarkand and then to Berlin under an Italian passport.4
The episode reflected badly on Bengal’s vaunted police intelligence sys-
tem. Bose executed his escape plans in spite of thirteen agents of the
Bengal Police IB and the Calcutta Police Special Branch who provided
information on his activities, the interception of his correspondence, and
the posting of police outside his family’s home. Richard Tottenham of the
Government of India observed bluntly that “Bose had hoodwinked the
police.”5 Not surprisingly, the Calcutta Police, who were responsible for
the surveillance of Bose, forcefully defended their performance. Police
Commissioner C. E. S. Fairweather noted that Bose had been released
“without any restrictions” or even bail, and that “as Subhas is an impor-
tant political leader, like Gandhi, no uniformed police guard was put
round his house.” Fairweather, used to having “inside intelligence” from
Bengali revolutionary groups, also argued rather oddly that it was impos-
sible for the police to obtain accurate information from inside the family
residence on Elgin Road:
As regards secret information, a moment’s reflection will show that outsid-

ers cannot possibly get information from inside a private house, except sec-
ond or third hand through some of Subhas’ relations. Such secret information
available is presumably misleading.6
What is more remarkable—and more revealing—than the Calcutta

Police’s rationalization of the reasons for Bose’s escape are the reasons
they attributed to his abrupt disappearance. Intelligence authorities in
Bengal did not simply consider Bose to be an “important political leader”
but a terrorist leader, and the reasons they ascribed to his disappearance
were deeply colored by decades of experience in the policing of the revo-
lutionary movement. Several analysts believed that Bose had followed past
revolutionaries in moving from a political to a religious quest. Deputy
Commissioner J. V. B. Janvrin of the Calcutta Police Special Branch con-
sidered it a realistic possibility that Bose had become a sannyasi, and ini-
tially suspected that Bose might have traveled to Pondicherry to meet with
Aurobindo Ghose, the former Bengal revolutionary turned spiritual leader.7
Janvrin did not believe, however, that Bose had necessarily “renounced
the world” in doing so:
He has, as I say, absconded for some definite purpose. He may yet be trying
to bring about a mass revolution from within. In which case he may have in
fact have left his house as a Sannyasi with the intention of bringing about a
mass rising on the lines of the Sannyasi rebellion as recounted by Bankim
Chattarji in the “Ananda Math.” It was this book which inspired the original
members of the Anushilan Samiti and it is from this book that the national
song “Bande Mataram” is taken.8
Thus, eighteenth months after the beginning of the Second World War, a
senior Special Branch official believed that it was a realistic possibility that
the “absconder” Bose might adhering to the vision of one of the canonical
texts of the revolutionary movement, the nineteenth-century novel
Anandamath.
Janvrin also speculated that Bose had chosen an alternate route to revo-
lution in India: seeking foreign assistance, a viewpoint that was more pre-
scient given Bose’s subsequent collaboration with the wartime German
and Japanese governments. He noted that Bose had already been in touch
with the Japanese in order to achieve the long-standing revolutionary goal
of a major arms shipment:
it is certain that he would not hesitate to accept an offer of help from the
Japanese…. Were he to reach Japan he would be in a position to supply the
Japanese Government with accurate information regarding the best means
whereby arms could be smuggled into this country and the most suitable
persons with whom to supply funds and arms and ammunition.9
The networks of police intelligence available to the Calcutta and Bengal

Police did help the Special Branch to gain a better understanding of Bose’s
actual departure date from Calcutta. “An old casual agent of a retired
police officer” was one of the sources who indicated—correctly—that
Bose had left over a week prior to the revelation of the news by his fam-
ily.10 Yet on the whole, decades of experience policing the revolutionary
movement in Bengal limited rather than enhanced the Special Branch and
Intelligence Branch’s understanding of Bose’s actions. To the consterna-
tion of the Government of India, local police were not unhappy for Bose
to leave the province; as in the 1930s, they downplayed Bose’s interna-
tional connections and believed that he was more of a threat inside Bengal
332 M. SILVESTRI
than outside India.11 Indeed, intelligence officials were downright con-

temptuous of the idea that a “non-marital” Bengali such as Bose, who was
to later assume command of the Indian National Army, could prove useful
to the Japanese military. R. E. A. Ray discounted persistent rumors that
Subhas Chandra Bose had traveled to Japan to seek the aid of the Imperial
government. His analysis of Bose’s actions was deeply colored by the neg-
ative opinion intelligence officers had formed of him over the previous
two decades; in Ray’s view, Bose was a deceitful and not terribly skilled
politician whose utility to Japan would be limited:
Rumours are being assiduously spread that he has gone to Japan to advise
the Japanese Government how to overthrow British power in India, but it
does not seem that a man of his caliber would be of much use in Japan. The
Japanese Government must have heard accounts of Indian political develop-
ments from their representatives in India that would shatter their faith in
him. It is difficult to believe that any Indian politician, however extremist in
an anti-British sense, with the examples before him of Hitler’s victims in
Europe and Japan’s unscrupulous adventurism in the Far East, would invite
Japan to India. The utmost he would go, one would think, would be to
attempt to trick Japan out of money in order to further the extremists’ cam-
paign against the British in India.
It was most likely, Ray concluded, that Bose was not in Japan but some-
where in India, “skulking in hiding in order to escape a jail sentence and
the responsibility for the failure of yet another so-called struggle.”12
Subhas Chandra Bose’s disappearance and his subsequent activities
during the war also illustrate the second major theme of this study: Bengali
revolutionaries’ anticolonial campaign and the efforts of intelligence offi-
cers to monitor, detain, and arrest revolutionaries comprise a global his-
tory. The overseas contacts Bengali revolutionaries forged with anticolonial
activists of various ideological persuasions and their efforts at arms smug-
gling illustrate how the movement was rooted in a single province, but
had global ramifications. The actions of the revolutionaries forced imperial
authorities to monitor these relationships and attempt to block revolu-
tionaries’ repeated plans to smuggle arms. The careers of some of the
leading figures involved in the campaign against the revolutionaries illus-
trate this point. They emerged as imperial experts on terrorism and insur-
gency, and their expertise was diffused throughout the empire in the
interwar period.
This cross-colonial movement of British intelligence officers was also

present during the Second World War, as MI5 greatly expanded its impe-
rial presence during the conflict.13 Some applied their Indian expertise to
SIS and MI5, such as former Bengal Police IB and Government of India
Intelligence Bureau officer P. C. Bamford, who worked for MI5. The
same was true of P. E. S. Finney, former superintendent of Deoli detention
camp, where the leadership of Anushilan and Jugantar was imprisoned
during the late 1930s, and head of the Calcutta Police Special Branch
from 1939 to 1940.14 While recovering from illness in Britain in 1940, he
was recruited by another former Special Branch colleague, Felix Cowgill
of SIS, for intelligence work in the United Kingdom. Cowgill explained
that MI5 “were desperately short of officers, particularly trained ones who
had some experience of the investigation of German activities.”15 Finney
served for three years in MI5, then returned to India as an Assistant
Director of the Intelligence Bureau in 1943. In May and June 1945, he
investigated a suspected double agent in Rangoon at the request of MI6’s
representatives in India, an organization known as the Inter Services
Liaison Department. At the end of the war, he spent three months in
Bangkok as part of the Allied occupying force with the 7th Indian Division,
where one of his principal tasks was to investigate the Indian National Army.16
One of the most prominent Bengal intelligence officers, former Calcutta
Police Commissioner Charles Tegart, also continued his career in intelli-
gence during the early part of the war. Tegart was recruited by another
former Indian Police officer, Deputy Chief of SIS Valentine Vivian, to
deliver reports on the status of Irish neutrality during the summer of 1940.
Tegart’s alarmist and exaggerated reports of German-IRA collaboration
gained the attention of the War Cabinet, and for a time had an important
influence on British policy towards Éire.17
While Tegart was subsequently considered for the position of special
advisor to Special Operations Executive’s newly established Indian sec-
tion, he was rejected because of poor health.18 Instead he was appointed
head of the Ministry of Food’s newly created Central Enforcement
Intelligence Bureau in 1942. At a time when the British public believed
that evasion of rationing regulations was widespread, Ministry of Food
officials sought to bolster their capacity to identify, monitor, and prosecute
black marketers. Tegart was a forceful advocate for greater cooperation
with British police forces in this endeavor, and his imperial policing experi-
ence enhanced his position as a police liaison. Mark Roodhouse observes
that Tegart’s “reputation as a counter-terrorism expert, built up over his
334 M. SILVESTRI
twenty-five year career in the Indian police, enabled him to forge links
with senior figures in the Metropolitan Police and the security services.”19
Tegart and his superior Sir Henry French persuaded the Home Office and
the Inspectors of Constabulary to allow food inspectors to attend regional
police conferences.20 Indeed, Tegart made the Central Enforcement
Intelligence Bureau into an enclave of colonial policing within the Ministry
of Food. He recruited former Calcutta Police Commissioner L. H. Colson
as his deputy, as well as other police colleagues with experience in the anti-
revolutionary campaign in Bengal. These officers achieved some successes,
but also alarmed Metropolitan Police detectives with their “cavalier
approach to investigation and prosecution.”21
Tegart’s old colleague in the Bengal Police, Godfrey Denham, had per-
haps the most extensive wartime intelligence career of any of the former
officers who had been involved in the anti-terrorist campaign in Bengal.
Following his tenure as Inspector General of the Singapore Police,
Denham had left imperial service to pursue a career in business in Southeast
Asia, serving as a director and ultimately Chairman of Anglo-Dutch
Plantations, Ltd, in Java. The Second World War saw Denham return to
imperial intelligence work, as the rapid expansion of Allied intelligence
services in Asia in the Second World War led to the recruitment of indi-
viduals with experience in business or imperial service in the region.22
Denham was sent from London in 1941 to evaluate SIS’s operations in
Southeast Asia. His report, which stressed the need for an overall regional
controller, impressed Air Vice-Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, the
British Commander in Chief Far East. Denham stayed on in Singapore as
regional controller, reporting directly to the Chief of SIS in London, and
later worked in Burma and India.23
While Denham’s efforts led to a slow improvement in the SIS presence
in Southeast Asia over the following months, it came too late to have
much impact in the face of the Japanese offensive that followed Pearl
Harbor.24 After SIS staff withdrew from Singapore to Calcutta in early
1942, Denham took general charge of SIS regional operations until he
returned to London in October.25 In 1943, he was asked to undertake
another imperial intelligence mission, this time in the Western Hemisphere.
The request was made by his former Intelligence Bureau colleague David
Petrie, who since 1941 had served as director-general of MI5.26 Denham
was dispatched to the United States to head a review of MI5’s wartime
operations in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. In introduc-
ing the former Bengal policeman to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Petrie
wrote at length about Denham’s experience in Asia with SIS and as

Inspector General of the Singapore Police, noting that “apart from being
professionally trained and widely experienced, Mr. Denham’s knowledge
of Intelligence matters, particularly Japanese activities, in the Far East is
probably far more up-to-date and extensive than that possessed by any but
a very few officers today.” He added that Denham’s “presence might be of
no little service” to other intelligence organizations besides the FBI. Lastly,
Petrie did not fail to note Denham’s “long visit” to the United States and
Canada during the Great War, when he assisted “the Federal authorities in
prosecuting the German consul-general and others in the well-known San
Francisco trial.”27
The mission received the approval of Hoover and US ambassador Gail
Winant, and Denham spent several months from 1943 to 1944 in North
America, the Caribbean, and Central America. He renewed contacts
among the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the New York City
police dating from his days prosecuting the Ghadar Party, and in particu-
lar, he drew on his imperial experience in the Caribbean and Central
America, where carried out investigations for MI5, SIS, and the Colonial
Office on intelligence and security requirements for the remainder of the
war and beyond. Shortly before his return to Britain, Denham wrote
from Port of Spain, Trinidad, to Petrie, about some of the issues he hoped
to explore in his final report. “I have been trying to look some distance
ahead,” he wrote
in regard to the future position out here and the place this part of the world
will take in the reconstruction of the world, and primarily the Empire, on
the conclusion of peace. Perhaps this sounds rather grand, but it is not
meant to be so; all I am trying to do is to put on record various ideas which
may be of interest to M.I.5, M.I.6, and the Colonial Office. Naturally I can-
not pretend to have an intimate knowledge of the Caribbean, but I can see
it in relation to and in comparison with other parts of the Empire.28
* * *
These musings by a former Bengal Police officer on the future of postwar

imperial intelligence are a reminder that many of the elements of the
three-decade-long intelligence campaign against the Bengali revolutionar-
ies became more prominent after the Second World War. The movement
of imperial police officers around the Empire and back to Britain expanded
336 M. SILVESTRI
after 1945, while counter-insurgency campaigns and the deployment of

imperial intelligence became more widespread and intensive as well.29
Intelligence-gathering by colonial police forces became an important ele-
ment of postwar British counter-insurgency doctrine.30 As historical schol-
arship has unpacked the historical and imperial roots of British
counter-insurgency, the experience of the intelligence campaign against
the Bengali revolutionaries helps us to better understand those roots, and
how colonial practices, ideologies, and personnel continued to shape
British intelligence and counter-insurgency in the postwar era.31 As this
study has argued, both the substantial role played by imperial intelligence
and the transnational nature of that campaign were evident prior to 1939.
Nascent imperial intelligence networks at times linked metropole and
empire, at other times were cross-colonial and at still other times extended
beyond the empire’s borders. The same is true of the activities of antico-
lonial revolutionaries, who, as they continued to combine nationalist and
internationalist visions, were to challenge the British Empire even more
forcefully following the Second World War.
APAC BL Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

CS Chief Secretary
CSAS Centre of South Asian Studies Archive, Cambridge University
IO India Office
Pol Political
Sec. Secretary
Eur. C 235, APAC BL
Bengal, 1995)
Notes
1. Review of Revolutionary Matters for the Week Ending 4th July 1940,
2. Review of Revolutionary Matters for the Week Ending 9th November 1939,
3. Bose had been imprisoned on 3 July 1940, the date he had planned to start
a new movement to remove the Holwell monument to the victims of the
“Black Hole of Calcutta.” See Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire:
History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
Global Struggle against Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2011), 184–194.
5. J. G. Laithwaite, Private Sec. to Viceroy, to M. O. Carter, Sec. to Governor
of Bengal, 4 February 1941, R/3/2/20, APAC BL; and GOI Home
Political 35/1941, NAI, cited in Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent, 194.
6. Fairweather also added, even more remarkably, “There was never any
question of making any arrangements to prevent Subhas from absconding
and in these circumstances I cannot see how any reflection can be cast on
the police. Neither I nor any of my officers accept the slightest responsibil-
ity for this.” C. E. S. Fairweather, Calcutta Police Commissioner, to M. O.
Carter, Sec. to Governor of Bengal, 8 February 1941, R/3/2/21, APAC
BL.
7. Janvrin to M. O. Carter, 27 January 1941, R/3/2/20, APAC BL.
8. “Subhas Bose,” enclosure to J. V. B. Janvrin, Deputy Commissioner,
Special Branch, to G. H. Puckle, Assistant Director, Intelligence Bureau,
New Delhi, 1 February 1941, R/3/2/21, APAC BL.
9. “Subhas Bose,” enclosure to J. V. B. Janvrin, Deputy Commissioner,
Special Branch, to G. H. Puckle, Assistant Director, Intelligence Bureau,
New Delhi, 1 February 1941, R/3/2/21, APAC BL.
10. J. V. B. Janvrin, “Re: Subhas Bose,” 28 January 1941, R/3/2/21, APAC
BL. Janvrin also wrote to G. H. Puckle of the Intelligence Bureau that he
338 M. SILVESTRI
was skeptical about the reliability of two of the local Central Intelligence
Officer’s sources who maintained that Bose had left on the 24th or 25th of
January. He added that a “reliable agent” who was “neither a Special
Branch nor an I.B. [sic] agent” also reported that Bose’s departure had
been a week earlier. J. V. B. Janvrin to G. H. Puckle, 29 January 1941,
R/3/2/21, APAC BL.
11. J. V. B. Janvrin to M. O. Carter, 27 January 1941, R/3/2/20, APAC BL.
12. Review of Revolutionary matters for the week ending 6th March 1941,
13. The number of MI5’s Defence Security Officers (DSOs) stationed in the
empire increased from six to twenty-seven over the course of the war.
Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of
MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 220.
14. For Finney’s time as superintendent of Deoli camp, see Durba Ghosh,
Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India,
1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 184–195.
Finney was knighted for his service as camp superintendent, but his tenure
was also marked by protests, a suicide, and revolutionaries’ complaints that
Finney and his staff physically abused prisoners.
15. P. E. S. Finney, Just My Luck: Memoirs of a Police Officer of the Raj (Dhaka:
The University Press, 2000), 207.
16. Finney, Just My Luck, 207–255.
17. Tegart’s “highly colored” reports exaggerated German influence in Ireland
and sparked abortive British efforts to bring Éire into the war on the prom-
ise of a postwar end to partition. Eunan O’Halpin, Spying on Ireland:
British Intelligence and Irish Neutrality during the Second World War
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 74–75 and 94–95.
18. O’Halpin, Spying on Ireland, 99.
19. Mark Roodhouse, Black Market Britain, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford
20. This allowed officers investigating black marketeering to consult indices
compiled by New Scotland Yard as well as the Ministry of Food. Roodhouse,
Black Market Britain, 135–136.
21. Roodhouse, Black Market Britain, 157.
22. Richard J. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War against Japan: Britain,
America and the Politics of Secret Service (Cambridge: Cambridge
23. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War against Japan, 37–38.
24. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War against Japan, 55 and 112.
25. Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949
(London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 578–579.
26. Petrie had been appointed director-general of MI5 at time when the rapid
wartime expansion of MI5 had created disorganization and ineffectiveness
within its ranks. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, 235–239.
27. David Petrie to J. Edgar Hoover, 21 April 1943, KV 4/206, NA UK.
28. Godfrey Denham to David Petrie, 2 February 1944, 69a, KV 4/209, NA
UK.
29. For the circulation of metropolitan and imperial police officers, see
Georgina Sinclair and Chris A. Waters, “‘Home and Away’: The Cross-
Fertilization between ‘Colonial’ and ‘British’ Policing, 1921–85.” Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35: 2 (2007), 221–238. For com-
parative treatments of postwar counter-insurgency, see Brian Drohan,
Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at
the End of the British Empire (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
2017); David French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency 1945–1967
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Andrew
Mumford, The Counter-Insurgency Myth: The British Experience of Irregular
Warfare (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). For postwar imperial
intelligence, see Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the
Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (London: HarperPress, 2013).
30. Mumford, Counter-Insurgency Myth, 2.
31. James Hevia, The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and
Empire-Building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012);
Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–
1903 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); and Kim A. Wagner,
“Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early
British Counterinsurgency,” History Workshop Journal 85 (2018),
217–237.
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Table of Free Featured Free sample

Content Alerts Articles issues
Index1
A Anderson, John, vii, 151, 159, 161,

Agents, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9–11, 13, 31, 44, 166, 167, 183n196, 262
49, 76, 77, 79, 84, 86, 94–99, Andrew, C. F., 10
103–105, 123n161, 133, 154, Antwerp, 234, 241, 243, 249–251,
156, 157, 161, 193, 195, 200, 260, 265
201, 204, 210–213, 216, Anushilan Samiti, 32, 41, 52, 58, 94,
225n75, 229n141, 236, 238, 132, 203, 207, 208, 289, 327,
242, 245, 253, 255–258, 261, 331
266, 271n50, 280, 285, 286, See also Dacca Anushilan Samiti
288, 294, 295, 297, 298, 304, Approvers, 44, 69n87, 69n88, 84,
305, 319n76, 330, 331, 333 94–99, 118n96, 122n150, 191,
Ahmad, Muzaffar, 210 193
Ahsanullah, Khan, 102, 139, 147 Armstrong, J. E., 55, 86, 115n44
Alam, Shamsul, 88–90, 93, 94, Arms Act (1878), 190, 236
116n59 Arya Samaj, 45, 46, 69n96
Alipore Bomb Trial, 33, 35, 87, 191, Asiatic Exclusion League, 290
192, 195, 296–297 Assam Rifles, 140, 177n121
Amnesty, 79, 106, 159, 206 Assassination, 1, 2, 5, 7, 12, 14, 16n2,
Amritsar massacre, 30, 150 19n28, 27, 31, 33, 34, 42, 58,
Anandamath (1882), 48, 71n111, 75, 88, 90–93, 99, 102, 105,
164, 331 107, 116n59, 122n142,
Andaman Islands, 33, 48, 159 123n158, 127, 130, 132, 140,
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3
354 INDEX
144, 145, 147, 162, 175n82, Bengal Police Association, 93

176n104, 176n109, 180n150, Bengal Smuggling of Arms Act
180n162, 189, 191, 192, 196, (1934), 263
199, 207, 234, 240, 261, 283, Bengal Suppression of Terrorist
297, 309–312, 329 Outrages Act (1932), 156, 167
Auxiliary Force, 34, 65n42, 128, 136, Bennett, Huw, 150
140, 147, 170n6, 176n107 Besant, Annie, 101, 102
See also Surma Valley Light Horse Bhadralok, 4, 31, 32, 50, 52, 89, 90,
101, 144, 163, 167, 168, 198, 266
Bhattacharya, Narendra Nath, see Roy,
B M. N.
Baden-Powell, R. S. S., 164 Biggane, Paul, 201, 224n74, 239
“Bajitpur gang,” 52 Bigge, Colonel Arthur, 28
Ball, Simon, 19n28, 145 Biswas, Purna Chandra, 94
Bamford, P. C., 109, 152, 207, 208, Bolshevism, 209, 287, 298, 301,
231n162, 333 316n41
Banarji, B. N., 244 See also Communism
Banarji, Upendra Nath, 48 Booth-Tucker, Frederick, 50
“Bande Mataram,” 33, 35, 48, 164, Bose, Khudiram, 35, 192, 208
331 Bose, Rash Behari, 13, 189–192, 203,
Banerjee, Surendranath, 160 204, 211, 212, 218, 253, 261,
Banerji, Rabindra, 159 295
Batavia, 33, 205, 303 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 13, 85,
Bayly, C. A., 5, 28, 36, 47, 67n67, 104–106, 123n161, 189, 204,
70n104 213, 215–218, 253, 329–332
Belgium, 234, 255, 265 The Indian Struggle, proscription of,
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 217
(BCLAA) (1925), 79, 131, 132, Bose, Sudhindra, 204
170n20 Bose, Sugata, vii, 106, 216
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Boy Scouts, 163–165
Ordinance (1924), 34, 131, See also Scouting
170n20, 213 Boy’s Own Paper, 99
Bengal Police, 90 Brabourne, Lord, 1–3
Central Intelligence Branch, 3, 6, 80 Bratachari movement, 163, 165, 166,
Criminal Investigation Department, 182n182
6, 42, 296, 297 British Army, 46, 89, 188
District Intelligence Branches, 6, 11, Brückenhaus, Daniel, 84, 199,
77–83, 86, 96, 153 220n11, 254
Special Branch, 40–42, 57, 331 Burge, B. E. J., 1, 14, 162
Special Department, 77 Burma, 53, 127, 153, 179n137, 213,
See also Military Intelligence Officers 234, 242, 252, 253, 255, 256,
(MIOs) 258, 276n116, 316n44, 334
INDEX 355
Burma Rebellion, 153 Churchill, Winston, 127

Burton, Antoinette, 7 Civil disobedience movement, 34, 49,
111, 129, 135, 215
Cleveland, Charles, 48, 49, 71n114,
C 224n66, 315n32
Calcutta, 2, 26, 78, 131, 187, 233, Colson, L. H., 110, 334
285, 329 Communism, 79, 109, 127, 200,
Calcutta Police 202–210, 214, 216, 217, 236,
Port Police, 209, 244, 306 245, 301, 307, 329
Special Branch, 5, 6, 28, 41, 95, Communist International, 205
101, 204, 209, 287, 322n115, Communist Party of India, 13, 189,
330, 331, 333 201, 205, 206, 211, 239
Canada, 14, 281, 289–291, 293, 294, Condos, Mark, 8, 56, 308
317n46, 334, 335 Connolly, Roddy, 239, 249
Candler, Edmund, 26 Criminal tribes, 6, 11, 25–60, 264,
Carmichael, Lord, 10 265, 329
Cawnpore, 144, 145 Criminal Tribes Act (1911), 51
See also Indian Rebellion “C,” see Cumming, Mansfield
Ceylon, 307 Cumming, Mansfield, 188, 301
Chandernagore, 13, 56, 190–198, Curzen, J. C., 286, 315n34
220n13, 297, 298 Curzon Wylie, William, 30, 63n20
Bengal Police raid in, 195
Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 48, 160,
164 D
Chatterjee, Basanta Kumar, 91, 159 Dacca, 52, 73n148, 82, 131, 145,
Chatterji, Bhupendranath, 132 147, 148, 171n25, 174n73,
Chattopadhyay, Suchetana, 245, 287 176n108, 177n109, 196, 250,
Chattopadhyay, Virendranath, 203, 289, 292
205 Dacca Anushilan Samiti, 34, 48, 52,
Chaudhuri, Nirad C., 101 54, 55, 201, 207, 241, 292,
Chelmsford, Lord, 159 293
China, 211, 213, 244, 301 Dacoity, 6, 11, 26, 30, 33, 34, 37, 39,
“Chitforce,” 135–143, 152, 154, 42–52, 60, 66n57, 67n71, 76,
174n73 82, 101, 107, 115n40, 123n158,
Chittagong, 2, 34, 97, 98, 104, 128, 130, 135, 205, 237, 264, 293,
130, 132–145, 147, 149, 150, 297, 329
154–157, 167, 170n6, 171n25, Dallas Smith, Lt.-Col. E. D., 136,
177n121, 180n153, 196, 242, 137
310 Daly, F. C., 29, 42, 45, 46, 63n18,
Chittagong Armoury Raid, 2, 12, 34, 107
58, 65n43, 98, 102, 111, Das, Bina, 233
119n114, 127–168, 195, 217, Das, C. R., 106, 210, 231n162
327, 328 Das, Hemchandra, 198, 199, 236
356 INDEX
Das, Pulin Behari, 54, 201, 207, 293 F

Das, Taraknath, 203, 238, 247, 290 Fairweather, C. E. S., 197, 330,
Dash, A. J., 157 337n6
Davidson, C. J., 212 Fakirs, 47, 49, 50
Day, Ernest, 105 Farmer, J. C., 110, 134, 137
Dayal, Har, 289, 290 Fenians, 282
De Valera, Eamon, 208, 216 Finney, P. E. S., 86, 95–97, 100, 162,
Defence of India Act (1915), 33, 108, 181n172, 195, 333, 338n14
109, 264 Fischer-Tiné, Harald, ix, 144, 198
Denham, Godfrey, 63n16, 88, Forth, Aidan, 50, 67n69
121n130, 292, 296–298, Friends of Freedom for India (FFI/
300–306, 312, 320n86, FOFI), 203, 204, 212, 238, 246,
322n112, 334, 335 247, 273n72, 299
Deoli, 161, 333, 338n14
Department of Criminal Intelligence,
Government of India, 7, 11, 58, G
199, 291 Gaelic American, 191
Detainees, see Detenus Gandhi, Mohandas, 10, 33, 35, 93,
Detenus, 108, 132, 159–161, 111, 127, 215, 217, 247, 251,
183n196 264, 302, 330
Dhingra, Madan Lal, 30, 199 salt march, 111, 127
Dixon, W. G., 94, 159, 322n115 Garlick, R. R., 147, 176n104, 233,
Douglas, Robert, 1 234
Dowbiggin, Herbert, 307 Geneva, 200, 201
Doyle, Mark, 83 Ghadar Party, 9, 30, 33, 199, 200,
Drums of Asia (1933), 8 238, 248, 253, 261, 270n24,
Dutt, B. K., 127 273n72, 288, 290, 292,
Dutt, G. S., 165 295–298, 300, 307, 308, 335
Dutt, Jugendra Chand, 49 Ghose, Aurobindo, 33, 41, 192, 330
Dutta, Kanai Lal, 35 Ghose, Barindra Kumar, 33, 41, 42
Dutta, Premananda, 103, 104 Ghose, Sailendranath, 13, 189, 203,
Dutta, Ullaskar, 249 204, 211, 215, 246, 247
See also Friends of Freedom for
India (FFI/FOFI)
E Ghosh, Durba, ix, 17n6, 27, 71n117,
Eastern Frontier Rifles, 136, 140 106, 115n38, 121n136, 158,
Easter Rising, 2, 34, 134, 239, 292 170n20, 268n2
Emerson, H. W., 146, 150 Ghosh, Ganesh, 98, 99, 196
Espinoza, Hugo, 13, 189, 210–215, Ghosh, Naren, 75
218, 228n129, 230n147, Giles, E. D. Brigadier, 57
230n149 Goondas, 60, 73n150, 264, 265,
European Association, 58, 146, 233 277n138, 277n139
INDEX 357
Goondas Act (1923), 60, 264, 265 Holman, T. G. H., 96, 97, 110,
Goswami, Narendra Nath, 191, 192 115n46, 142, 174n71
Government of India Act (1935), 1, Homosexuality, 55
158, 168 Hong Kong, 213, 248, 271n50, 292,
Griffiths, Percival, 14, 15, 43, 44, 303
67n71, 181n174 Hoover, J. Edgar, 334, 335
Gunga Din (1939), 26 Hopkinson, William, 281, 288–291,
Gupta, Dinesh Chandra, 131, 295, 312, 316n44, 316n45,
176n104, 233 317n46, 317n49, 317n50,
Gupta, Heramba Lal, 187, 188, 219n3 317n53, 317n56
Gupta, Nalini, 207 Hose, J. W., 123n154, 256, 271n44,
316n38, 316n41
Hughes-Buller, R. B., 48, 51, 52,
H 118n81
Haldar, Ananta, 102 Hunt, John, 89, 155, 156, 162,
Hamburg, 202, 213, 229n141, 239, 179n147, 181n174
249, 251, 256, 257, 259, 260, Hussain, Abid, see Obed, Henry
271n50 Hyslop, Jonathan, 245, 250, 273n76
Hands, Adam, 156, 157, 180n153
Hansen, August Peter, 244
Hardinge, Lord, 10, 20n42, 21n44, I
34, 164, 182n178, 189, 192, Indian Army
203, 236, 283, 306, 315n23 Gurkha Rifles, 138, 141, 142, 150,
Harney, Augley, 86 174n67
Harper, Tim, 13, 21n45, 188, 200, Mahratta Light Infantry, 141, 142
265 Indian Mutiny, see Indian Rebellion
Hart, Peter, 240, 304, 322n125 Indian National Congress (INC), 32,
Heart of Aryavarta, The (1925), 27, 34, 35, 47, 63n21, 104, 110,
61n6 129, 135, 139, 164, 176n107,
Henry, Edward, 283, 285, 315n32 200, 206, 217, 226n98
Hindu Conspiracy Case, 203, 295, Indian Police Commission, 6, 95
298 Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), 3,
Hindustan Socialist Republican 7–9, 18n9, 20n38, 20n40, 36,
Association (HSRA), 30, 65n47, 188, 199–204, 206–209, 211,
95, 119n110, 127, 223n56 213–218, 219n5, 220n11,
History sheets, 44, 55, 76, 79, 84, 95, 224n66, 224n74, 225n85,
96, 103–111, 118n94, 123n156, 225n86, 226n98, 227n117,
154, 179n141, 191, 194, 228n124, 229n141, 231n162,
273n77, 293, 305, 318n62 231n165, 233–267, 271n50,
Hoare, Samuel, 61n1, 180n156, 280, 282, 283, 291, 293, 303,
183n196, 234 305, 322n120
358 INDEX
Indian Rebellion, 28, 30, 36, 45–47, 318n71, 319n73, 321n106,

56, 59 321n110, 322n112
India Office (IO), 7, 8, 63n20, 104, Johnson, J. R., 125n179, 133, 135,
142, 174n72, 174n73, 188, 199, 138–141, 172n43, 172n48,
201, 202, 215, 217, 219n5, 173n52, 173n55, 173n61
231n160, 250, 254–259, Johnston, Hugh J. M., 290, 317n47,
261–263, 271n47, 276n128, 317n56
283, 287–290, 293, 294, 301, Jugantar, 34, 51, 54, 58, 73n148, 75,
302, 306, 314n16, 315n34, 98, 104, 123n158, 128, 132,
316n37, 316n38, 316n40, 133, 201, 203, 205, 207, 208,
318n58, 319n83 239, 295, 333
Informers, 2, 5, 11, 31, 44, 47, 55,
77, 90, 94–99, 103–106,
115n44, 133, 196, 255, 258, K
263, 266, 291, 294, 304 Kali, 26, 27, 37, 46, 50, 51, 108
Intelligence Bureau, Government of Kanungo, Hem Chandra, 107,
India, 7, 26, 36, 39, 56, 90, 127, 124n166, 124n167
253, 257, 280, 303 Kaye, J. W., 37
Interdepartmental Committee on Kell, Vernon, 257, 293
Eastern Unrest (ICEU), 256, Kemm, A. H., 141, 172n43, 173n52,
257, 275n110 173n58
Inter-Provincial Conspiracy Case, 95 Kennedy, Pringle, 33
Ireland, 14, 151, 181n170, 202, 208, Kenya, 121n132, 149, 177n113
225n85, 231n160, 238, 240, Khan, Dada Amir Haider, 246–248,
246, 247, 251, 268n9, 280, 292, 251
303–305, 307, 309, 311, Kidd, F. W., 287, 288, 316n42
322n123, 322n124, 323n130, Kingsford, Douglas, 33, 35
323n137, 338n17
Irish Republican Army (IRA), 240, 303
L
Lahore Conspiracy Case, 127
J Lambert, David, 281, 314n9, 314n14
Jackson, Stanley, 115n45, 146, 233, Lascars, 13, 234, 235, 244–256, 259,
234 260, 263, 266, 272n55, 272n58,
Jallianwala Bagh, 30 272n65, 273n70, 273n76
Janvrin, J. V. B., 330, 331 Laushey, David M., 17n3, 17n6,
Japan, 13, 32, 187, 189, 198, 203, 65n44, 145, 176n93
211, 212, 248, 253, 254, 261, League of Nations, 14, 223n51,
295, 301, 331, 332 259–267, 277n131, 277n135
Jatra, 80, 113n19 LeMesurier, Henry, 284, 285
Jeffery, Keith, 17n8, 18n14, 76, Leonard, Captain D. R. G., 154
112n3, 283, 300, 315n24, Lester, Alan, 281, 314n9, 314n14
INDEX 359
Lindsay, Major George, 162, 178n136 Midnapore, 1, 2, 14, 63n18, 110,

Lowman, Francis J., 98, 102, 110, 152, 155, 162, 167, 178n132,
125n179, 131, 162, 172n39, 228n129, 231n165, 233, 329
172n48, 172n49, 172n51, 329 Military Intelligence Officers (MIOs),
Lytton, Lord, 37 12, 89, 116n65, 149–157, 162,
163, 165, 178n137
Ministry of Food, 333, 334, 338n20
M Central Enforcement Intelligence
MacDermott, John Murphy, 38 Bureau, 333, 334
Maclean, Kama, 8, 20n33, 144, Minto, Lord, 28, 58, 88, 116n59
169n2, 170n12, 175n86, Monro, James, 282
177n114 Morley, John, 30, 50, 88
Macmullen, General Sir Norman, 151, Moscow, 198
153, 155 Mukherjee, Abani, 208, 211
Macmunn, George, 26 Mukherjee, Jadugopal, 205, 208
Majumdar, Nalini, 98 Mukherjee, Jotin, 35
Majumdar, S. C., 93 Mulkane, Joseph, 246
Malaya, 157, 302 Mullock, D. W., 146, 147
Malayan Police Special Branch, 78, Murderous Outrages Act (1867), 56
113n12 Mymensingh, 52, 155
Manicktolla revolutionary cell, 195, Mysterious India (1938), 25–27
225n79
Manjapra, Kris, 4, 18n18, 204
“Martial races,” 27, 55, 120n121, N
152, 308, 325n160 Nathan, Matthew, 292
Mau Mau Rebellion, 149, 177n113 Nathan, Robert, 281, 292–300, 312,
McMahon, Paul, 303 321n102, 321n104
Mecca, 214 Nixon, J. C., 54
Meerut Conspiracy Case, 19n32, 127,
169n1, 200
Mellows, Liam, 202 O
Metropolitan Police, 39, 201, 259, Obed, Henry, 239, 244–251, 255,
282, 283, 285, 307, 314n16, 256, 265, 273n77
315n34, 334 O’Malley, Kate, ix, 200, 220n11,
MI5, 3, 7, 8, 14, 17n8, 18n9, 18n14, 225n85
43, 96, 188, 199, 206, 209,
224n67, 256, 257, 259, 262,
283, 287, 293, 296, 333–335, P
338n13, 339n26 Palestine
“Black List” of Indian Arab Revolt, 279, 280, 306, 307,
revolutionaries, 188 310, 311
MI6, see Secret Intelligence Service British Section of the Palestine
(SIS) Gendarmerie, 307
360 INDEX
Panchajanya Press, 139 Rodda & Co., arms theft from, 237
Parhartali Railway Institute, 143, 144, Ronaldshay, Lord, 27
156 See also Zetland, Lord
Paris, 58, 191, 198, 200, 201, 236, Rorke, George Gordon, 238
285, 286, 314n15 Rowlatt Committee, see Sedition
Partition of Bengal (1905), 2, 31, 32, Committee (1918)
47, 77 Roy, Basanta Kumar, 247
Peddie, James, 1 Roy, M. N., 13, 103, 187, 189,
Peel, Robert, 262 201–212, 214, 215, 218,
Petrie, David, 56, 57, 258, 297, 301, 228n124, 231n162, 239, 245,
306–312, 334, 335, 339n26 249, 256, 298
Plowden, C. W. C., 82 Royal amnesty (1919), see Amnesty
Pondicherry, 38, 195, 197, 198, 330 Royalists, the, 12, 146, 147, 176n104
Popplewell, Richard J., 66n64, Russia, 32, 201, 207, 208, 286
117n78, 224n66, 288 Russo-Japanese War, 31, 32
Prabartak Sangha, 192
Prentice, W. D. R., 134
Propaganda, anti-terrorist, 154 S
Punjab, 26, 31, 37, 38, 90, 127, 297, Sadhus, 28, 30, 43–50, 59, 62n10,
308–310 62n11
Safranski, Nicolas, 198
Saha, Gopi Nath, 105
Q Salkeld, H. L., 55, 293
Quinn, John, 211 Salvation Army, 50, 51
Quinton, H., 145 Sannyasis, 28, 47–50
Santhals, 137
Santiniketan, 10
R Sanyal, Sachindra, 253, 274n98
Rai, Lala Lajpat, 9, 20n38, 45, 198, 211 Satia, Priya, 84, 298
Ram Krishna Mission, 45, 69n95 Scotland Yard, see Metropolitan Police
Ramnath, Maia, 200, 226n89, 289 Scouting, see Boy Scouts
Raschid, Abdur, see Espinoza, Hugo Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), 3, 7,
Ray, Moti Lal, 192, 194 14, 18n9, 188, 201, 202, 204,
Ray, R. E. A., viii, 44, 56, 75, 76, 79, 209, 211, 256, 257, 259, 260,
83, 87, 93, 95, 98, 107–109, 275n110, 283, 287, 294, 300,
128, 144, 178n134, 197, 301, 318n71, 319n76, 321n106,
222n45, 327, 329, 332 321n110, 333–335
Raychaudhuri, Tapan, 32, 48 Sedition Committee (1918), 27, 32,
Raza, Ali, 4, 245 237, 269n21, 303
Reid, Robert, 129, 148, 263, 265 Sen, Narendra Nath, 52, 53
Reprisals, 12, 139, 143–149, 151, Sen, Surjya, 58, 128, 138, 142, 154
180n150, 217, 328 Shanghai, 204, 212, 248, 254, 279,
Risley, H. H., 30, 63n18 301
INDEX 361
Shanghai Intelligence Bureau, 301 Taylor, S. G., 85, 154, 164

Sherman, Taylor, 264 Tegart, Charles, viii, 27, 48, 59,
Shooter, Robert, 140, 141, 173n65 63n16, 88, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99,
Simpson, N. S., 131 102, 105, 106, 120n118,
Singapore Police, 212, 302, 312, 334, 121n130, 123n158, 130, 132,
335 158, 159, 163, 171n21, 171n25,
Political Intelligence Bureau (PIB), 191, 193, 195, 196, 200–202,
7, 238, 302, 303 208, 224–225n75, 225n79, 260,
Singh, Ananta Lal, 97–99, 121n130 279–281, 303–312, 323n135,
Singh, Bhagat, 30, 127 324n142, 324n146, 329, 333,
Singh, Duleep, 37, 38, 66n64 334, 338n17
Singh, Harbaksh, 212 lecture on “Terrorism in India,” 27,
Sleeman, W. H., 37, 44, 47, 66n59, 158
69n92, 70n105 Terrorism, 3, 5, 6, 14, 15, 16n2,
Smedley, Agnes, 203, 247, 273n70, 25–27, 30–32, 34, 35, 42, 48,
273n72 50, 56, 59, 60, 76, 83, 96, 106,
Smuggling, arms, 13, 38, 40, 199, 108, 110, 127, 129–132,
202, 205, 207, 212–214, 144–146, 148, 149, 154, 158,
233–267, 280, 306, 328, 332 159, 165, 167, 190, 202–210,
Sokol movement, 163 217, 243, 259–267, 280, 281,
South Africa, 283, 311 284, 286, 305–312, 329, 332
Special Operations Executive (SOE), Thagi & Dakaiti Department, 11,
333 37–39, 44, 59, 66n59, 67n71,
Spence, Richard, 294, 319n76 69n91, 70n104
Spring-Rice, Cecil, 296 See also Thuggee; Thugs
Statesman, 145, 197, 212, 306 Thuggee, 36, 37, 39, 43–50, 56,
Stephenson, H. L., 209 69n92, 70n104, 95
Stevens, A. E., 40, 41 Thugs, 6, 25, 26, 28–30, 37, 39,
Stevenson, Ivor, 154, 155, 157 44–47, 50, 55, 59, 60, 66n57,
Stevenson-Moore, C. J., 284 67n69, 69n92, 70n104, 264, 329
Straits Settlements, 241, 302, 303 Thwaites, Norman, 294, 295
Surma Valley Light Horse, 136, 149 Tibet, 211, 214, 301
See also Auxiliary Force Torture, 11, 77, 99–103, 139, 196,
Surveillance of revolutionaries, 5 311
See also Watchers Twynam, H. J., 18n15, 83, 157
Swadeshi movement, 31, 32, 190,
288, 293
V
Vaidik, Aparna, 97, 119n110
T Vanguard, 205, 206, 210, 228n128
Tagore, Rabindranath, 10, 165 See also Roy, M. N.
Taylor, Coralie, 145 Veasey, J. C., 39, 40
362 INDEX
Vickery, Philip, 200, 202, 216, 217, Winter, Ormonde de L’Épée, 304,
259 305, 322n124
Villiers, Edward, 146, 147, 176n104, Wiseman, William, 294–296, 300,
233, 234 318n71, 321n104
Vivian, Valentine, 206, 260, 333 Writers’ Building, 2, 34, 92, 131,
170n18, 176n104, 233, 297
W
Waddadar, Pritilata, 143 Y
Wagner, Kim, viii, ix, 30, 37, 46 YMCA, 159, 160
Wallinger, John Arnold, 199–202, Younie, John, 145, 173n65
224n66, 229n141, 240, 257,
258, 271n41, 271n50, 276n116,
282, 291, 303, 314n16 Z
Walton, Calder, 3 Zachariah, Benjamin, 4, 245, 272n65
Watchers, 85, 132, 133, 138, 194, Zetland, Lord, 183n191, 230n151
310 See also Ronaldshay, Lord
Watson, Alfred, 197

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BRITAIN AND THE WORLD

Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’

More information about this series at

Britain and the World

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

Cover illustration: The Print Collector / Alamy Stock Photo

A number of institutions have generously supported the research in the

historians at a time when access to colonial-era materials on this subject

1 Introduction: Imperial Intelligence and a Forgotten

Part I Policing Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal 23

2 The “Bomb Cult” and “Criminal Tribes”: Revolutionaries

3 Surveillance, Analysis, and Violence: The Operations of the

4 Intelligence Failures, Militarization, and Rehabilitation:

Part II The Wider World 185

5 Transnational Revolutionaries and Imperial Surveillance:

6 Spies, Sailors, and Revolutionaries: Bengal Revolutionaries,

7 Intelligence Expertise and Imperial Threats: Bengal

8 Epilogue: Bengal Intelligence Officers and the Second

Table 3.1 Bengal Police Central Intelligence Branch Staff 80

Introduction: Imperial Intelligence

In February 1939, the Governor of Bengal, Lord Brabourne, toured the

© The Author(s) 2019 1

In the following month, intelligence indicated that some of the revolu-

“Bengali terrorism” remained a near-constant fear of colonial officials

­ uring the era of post-Second World War decolonization, the extensive

on Indian revolutionary movements were not trained specifically in intel-

decade, military officers with intelligence backgrounds were recruited to

far from marginal to the trajectory of Indian nationalism. Rather, these

IPI was also concerned to remove references to real-life Indian national-

Bengali Hindus of nationalist sympathies certainly felt the intrusive

In reply, the Governor of Bengal, Lord Carmichael, admitted that “all

colonial state against revolutionaries: the widespread use of detention

about revolutionary ideologies and tactics such as practical instruction in

l­egislation in Bengal, in the effort to prevent the clandestine movement of

Indian Civil Service officer Percival Griffiths, Burge’s successor as District

career in imperial administration and business, authored a history of the

Abbreviations Used in the Endnotes

APAC BL Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library,

EB&A Eastern Bengal and Assam

Short Introduction (2nd edition: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),

9. Kate O’Malley, “Indian Political Intelligence (IPI): The monitoring of real

Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow

44. Lord Carmichael, Governor of Bengal, to Lord Hardinge, 20 August

Policing Revolutionary Terrorism in

The “Bomb Cult” and “Criminal Tribes”:

In 1938, a time when the Bengali revolutionary movement had been

© The Author(s) 2019 25

presented their activities as deeply rooted in Indian religion and Indian

ostensibly more sober and critical assessments by imperial officials. The

already producing sophisticated anticolonial propaganda and distributing

revolutionaries. While subsequent chapters will explore the functioning of

knowledge contained in H. H. Risley’s Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891),

1 The Bengal Revolutionaries

a­ ssassination of a British police officer in the Punjab, he achieved iconic

resistance against British rule. The authors of the Sedition Committee

newspapers such as the English-language Bande Mataram, edited by

How many revolutionaries were engaged in these activities? In 1910,

“them internally in the matter of recruitment and organisation, and exter-

1 Introduction: Imperial Intelligence and a Forgotten

Part I Policing Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal 23

2 The “Bomb Cult” and “Criminal Tribes”: Revolutionaries

3 Surveillance, Analysis, and Violence: The Operations of the

4 Intelligence Failures, Militarization, and Rehabilitation:

Part II The Wider World 185

5 Transnational Revolutionaries and Imperial Surveillance:

6 Spies, Sailors, and Revolutionaries: Bengal Revolutionaries,

7 Intelligence Expertise and Imperial Threats: Bengal

8 Epilogue: Bengal Intelligence Officers and the Second

Table 3.1 Bengal Police Central Intelligence Branch Staff 80

uring the era of post-Second World War decolonization, the extensive

legislation in Bengal, in the effort to prevent the clandestine movement of

APAC BL Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library,

a ssassination of a British police officer in the Punjab, he achieved iconic

impractical and the Provincial Governments found it so and gave it up.”

APAC BL Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library,